Unlocking Heart Coherence for Creative Performance and Stress Resilience | #204

Episode 204
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[00:00:24] Simon Vetter: Welcome to the Vision Architect Podcast. I'm super excited to talk to Bruce Crier today. He is an expert on hard coherence, on creativity in wellbeing. We met many years ago when he was a CEO of HeartMath and he developed this, concept of heart coherence. We'll talk more about that.

He's also, adjunct faculty at Stanford teaching courses around creativity and performance, and he loves to sing and he loves to dance, and that's actually how he started his career. So welcome, Bruce. Great to have you.

[00:01:02]  Bruce Cryer: Great to see you again, Simon. This is a treat.

[00:01:05] Simon Vetter: Yes. Let's start with heart coherence.

I saw you speak probably 20 years ago at, one of the leadership conference where you talked about the heart, the importance of the heart in leadership. Can you describe what a hard coherence is?

[00:01:22]  Bruce Cryer: Sure. So this organization you've referred to called the HeartMath Institute, which started almost 35 years ago now, and I was there at the beginning and later CEO.

We started with the premise back in 19 90, 91. That. The West had missed the boat on what the heart actually was that we had concluded, or at least some scientists had concluded during the time of industrialization and, industrial revolution that the heart was an amazing, but that was about it.

And yet every religion, every spiritual system, every parent. Reveres the heart. You tell your kid, go, just play with your heart, honey. It'll be, you'll be fine. Just sing with your heart. Just speak from your heart. Did we all mean just play with your pump? Just sing with your pump? No, no. We met something deeper than that.

So we believe there was a, something really missing in our thing, our, especially in the West, in our thinking about the, the importance of the heart and that in fact the heart was an intelligence system, not just a pump. And so we began our journey to understand more, we believe we could prove this medically through mainstream western science.

And before long, we realized that our emotional state and how our heart beats are absolutely linked together. And a simple visual on this. And you remember when I used to do the demos back in the day, if you're feeling frustrated about anything. Money, time, the boss, anything, the spouse, the in-laws, whatever it may be.

That feeling of frustration causes the pattern of how our heart is beating to look chaotic. It looks kinda like an earthquake. If you can visual us. Californians, can we know what that kind of looks like on a, on a chart? On the other hand, when you're feeling love or peaceful or compassionate, any of those things.

That creates this beautiful sine wave pattern in how our heart is beating now, which do you want? Chaos or coherence, right? And so we discovered that this calling it coherence matched how physics looks at this, that in fact when the heart is beating in a very smooth. What they would call a coherent rhythm that's really efficient, kinda like a laser is a super efficient form of light.

You can take something that functions like a laser and repair a retina with it. You can't take an LED bulb in your ceiling and repair any retinas. You know, so there's something about lasers that's super focused and super efficient. So we said actually humans are capable of a similar concept. Normally we're doing okay and we can function, we can speak, we can do our job, but there's a whole nother level of efficiency coherence.

Clarity that's possible. That has to do with the heart. We began to explore that. The term heart coherence emerged from that. Some of your listeners, I'm sure know the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. He has gotten in deeply into this. He's had an affiliation with HeartMath for probably 15 years now, and so that's, spawned the idea of brain coherence and heart coherence and the idea that.

If we want our brain to really function like we wanted as a leader, as a parent, as a, as a human. The heart's coherence is a huge booster 'cause the heart's so powerful, it sets the tone in the body. So if, you got the right tone kind of going in your heart, it's gonna make it easier for the brain to do its job.

Now that's a nice concept. We were able to prove out through many, many studies over the years that indeed, if your heart is more coherent, the brain kind of entrains to that and says, oh, thank you. Thank you heart. You're making it easier for me to be really sharp and do my do what I'm supposed to do.

[00:04:58] Simon Vetter: I really loved about your presentation is we were surrounded people in the room.

You ask volunteer and you hooked him up to this heart math device and you could record the heart frequency.

[00:05:09]  Bruce Cryer: Yes.

[00:05:10] Simon Vetter: And as he stepped up, you could see he was a little bit nervous.

[00:05:14]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah.

[00:05:14] Simon Vetter: So his graph was a little bit more, a little bit more chaotic. And then you prompted him and say, okay, I'm not gonna ask you to sing, but if I ask you to sing, what would you sing in front of 300 people?

And so you could see how this person was so overwhelmed and stressed and the heart showed it.

[00:05:34]  Bruce Cryer: Yes, exactly.

[00:05:35] Simon Vetter: you keep priming the pump and say, okay, if he's gonna sing, what would you like to hear? And so for like a minute, his heart was like going crazy.

the power of this was you said, okay, I'm not gonna ask you to sing. So he released and he was relieved. And then you asked everybody in the room, 300 people to calm down, to take a deep breath, close your eyes and do. Kind of being in silence and focus on the breath and focusing on a happy moment in life.

And his heart frequency started to, as you said, smoothen out. It became coherent.

[00:06:14]  Bruce Cryer: Exactly.

[00:06:15] Simon Vetter: Interestingly, when you looked at the guy from the outside, you couldn't see it physically outside, but his heart was responding so heavily to just the thoughts you created in his mind.

[00:06:27]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah. Yeah. a powerful demonstration, I think, to just help folks get this visual.

So as you said, and I may sound like I'm a bit of a sadist, you know, forcing this guy, number one, he did volunteer, so I, I never just pulled somebody up from the audience. So this was, an extrovert that said, I wanna come up and be in front of 200 people. So I thought, okay, I got a little bit of leeway here.

You

[00:06:46] Simon Vetter: got the recognition too.

[00:06:47]  Bruce Cryer: That's exactly, exactly. But once he got up there, as you said, I, I kind of kept teasing like I was really gonna make him sing. Now the audience was kind of in on the joke that I think he's, Bruce is kidding, but they, I wasn't sure, but what you saw happen, 'cause he was now wired up, was just the thought of being potentially embarrassed was causing his heart rate to spike.

And to get more chaotic. So as soon as that would happen, then the audience spotted that and the audience would laugh. Now that made him even more embarrassed, you know? So it was this kind of escalating thing. And then finally I said, don't worry. I'm really not gonna, I'm not gonna make you sing. It's, really okay.

And then what was fun as you, just pointed out, when I just asked him to focus on some lovely feeling in his life, his child, his pet, his mother, his garden nature, God. It didn't really matter, but something that he genuinely felt grateful for. We all watched the same 200 people that just watched his heart, totally chaotic and obviously chaotic.

Now suddenly it has this smooth, very obvious rhythm called a sine wave, a coherent wave, and like the audience is all like. That's the same guy. This is real time. Bruce isn't making this up. So that's, it's a powerful demonstration because we have the power by changing our thoughts, changing our emotions, especially to dramatically shift what's happening in our heart, which has a global impact on our entire body.

Yeah. The

[00:08:16] Simon Vetter: connection between the heart and the brain and what we think is tremendous powerful.

[00:08:22]  Bruce Cryer: Exactly

[00:08:24] Simon Vetter: how can we apply that day in, day out?

[00:08:27]  Bruce Cryer: Well, you know, at the risk of sounding trite, a lot of it is about appreciation and gratitude. You know, what we learned back in those days, in the early nineties was that anytime any human, part of the reason I could do a demonstration like that with a volunteer that I'd never met in front of hundreds of people is we had already tested thousands of thousands of people and we know what to expect.

If you can coach somebody. Into a positive emotional state and get 'em breathing, get their breathing slowed down a little bit. The pattern of their heart will change. I've done this thousands of times and it, and it works. So the point is it really takes both the slowing of the breath, but especially an ability to say, Hey, wait a minute, I can be caught up in the stress right now.

That's gonna compromise my thinking process. Most likely I'm liable to make a shortsighted decision because I'm just reacting right now. I'm liable to, say something that's not the best thing to say because I'm a little bit too reactive right now. Or I can say, let's slow down. Let's take control.

Let's focus on something to shift my mood. That's that I love in my life, my daughter, my anything. So that's the practice. It's to slow ourselves down. But you can do this in a meeting. You could be sitting there wishing the meeting was, it would end and pouring lots of stress chemicals through your body because it, it is not gonna end yet.

Or you can sit there and say, well, what can I appreciate? This is a terrible meeting, but I don't need to ruin my body in the process. I can be at least neutral and daydream about something I love. So I think the practice of. Both remembering that the slowing our breath is taking control so we're not the one reacting and, and then, and therefore not using all of our capacities.

Instead, we're taking control, but we're also saying, I going to consciously make an effort to shift my mood out of I'm the victim of this terrible meeting into, oh, what can I enjoy? That's

[00:10:24] Simon Vetter: a

[00:10:24]  Bruce Cryer: big mindset.

[00:10:25] Simon Vetter: Now we all get into situations where we feel stressed or uncomfortable, where our heart reacts. It's, it's a natural survival mechanism.

What can we do to build that resilience where the heart almost becomes stronger at not reacting? Is there a way to create some resilience around that?

[00:10:46]  Bruce Cryer: That's a great question. Well, I think so, you mentioned singing and dancing, and so I have trained as a classically trained singer, as a contemporary dancer, as an actor, I didn't get good at any of those things to this place where I could perform hundreds of times in New York City on major shows without a lot of practice.

I had to practice, you know, 10, the old 10,000 hours to be, to master anything. And so it does take practice. So when I was first learning this, when we were developing these ideas in the early nineties, I had one of those watches that would go off on the hour. It was a Casio it. And you know, this is like, that was so high tech.

Your watch will beep. Oh my God. You can set it to go off at a certain time. Oh my God, that's amazing. And that's the, that's the phase of life we were in, right? And so I would take advantage of that function for it to beep every hour when I wanted it to. And on the hour I would practice. Bringing my attention to the area of my heart and breathing slowly and appreciating.

At that time, it was my daughter who was probably about four or five years old, and when I would focus on her, like I always melted into this feeling of of love, I would practice that on the hour. If I could be in a meeting, I could be working on a project. It didn't matter. I would make. Now, if I was literally talking and doing a presentation, I wasn't gonna have the entire room of 200 people.

Although that probably would've been a good idea. So my point is that it took practice because just like anything, the practice for me as a singer, as a dancer meant I was developing the circuitry to be able to do it consistently at a high level. I couldn't sing at a high level consistently when I started.

I couldn't dance at a high level consistently. When I started, I had a practice, so I got better and better and built the circuitry to know how to tap into that state. So that's what we're doing when I would practice on the hour, just breathe through my heart for a minute or so and, and slow breaths.

But, but focusing specifically on the feelings of appreciation and gratitude, I was starting to, not only that feels good, number one, like why wouldn't you do that? Oh wow. What have I been missing? I, I could have been doing this my whole life, but it also starts to feel natural after a while. And you start to, and then I realized after time when I would just be kind of reflecting on something, I would naturally kind of go focus on my heart without even thinking about it and just kind of calm down, find that pleasant feeling that I had trained myself how to feel.

So the training is important, but think of it as anything else you got good at. You didn't tell yourself, I'm practicing riding a bicycle when you were six. But you were, you practiced enough and you did it enough times, you got good and you might get off a bike for 30 years. You get back on, you're a little rusty, but you, you can do it again.

Those circuits never completely went away. So that's the, that's the essence.

[00:13:37] Simon Vetter: You have worked with a lot of leaders from different backgrounds, performers. What happens when the heart is not coherent, when the heart starts to go in a chaotic. Frequency And what, what's the cost to the person and the people around them?

[00:13:53]  Bruce Cryer: Well, boy, that's a, that's a big question. And of course there's a spectrum of, of costs. So, but I think the sim the simple thing first internally, if we think of the heart as, a very powerful drumbeat, I mean, name another organ that you can hear, that you can feel a pulse. There isn't one. So the fact that it's pulsing and every cell in your body is getting that pulse, kaboom.

Every cell in your body, you can put an electrode on your big toe and it can register the heartbeat. No problem. So there's a drumbeat that's spreading to every single cell in our body. There's also an electrical and magnetic signal that's going out, not just a, a feeling. It's like a, an actual signal. So, I lost my train of thought a little bit on your question again here.

But, but the, the, the training process is

[00:14:41] Simon Vetter: what happens when. The signal is chaotic.

[00:14:45]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So when it's chaotic, there's, there's the, the, the rhythm that's chaotic now, like a chaotic drumbeat going through you, there's an electrical signal that's kind of fritzing going through you, the guy up on the stage that, in your example, the rhythm of his heart is chaotic.

It's not beating in a smooth rhythm, and all of those signals are being transmitted to every cell in the body. and on top of that, that's usually happening because we're feeling some kind of stressful feeling. We're feeling anxious, we're feeling overwhelmed, we're feeling furious. And research 30 plus years ago had undercovered the idea that anytime we are triggered, stressfully triggered.

In a day, an alert on your phone, just the name of somebody showing up in your inbox, knowing you have to open the email as chain reaction of about 1400 biochemical events start happening in your body to prepare you for the threat. So

[00:15:40] Simon Vetter: let's repeat that. 1400 biochemical processes,

[00:15:44]  Bruce Cryer: 1400 biochemical changes.

The reason for this is in the survival days when we literally had to worry about surviving lunch because another tribe could attack us or an animal could attack us, we needed. Around 1400 biochemicals to give us the energy to fight the threat or to flee from threat, and therefore the response called fight flight.

Now they realize it's a little more sophisticated than that, but the essence is, is that so our body's ready to gear up in a, in a, in a nanosecond to, to deal with that alert that just popped up on your phone, that text message from who that happening. So that's all tied into what's going on in your heart.

[00:16:23] Simon Vetter: What does that do to the brain and the mental functioning? And then I want to leap towards creativity and vision and imagination. So let's go with, you said the heart has a magnetic frequency.

[00:16:38]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[00:16:40] Simon Vetter: What's the impact on the brain when the heart goes chaotic?

[00:16:44]  Bruce Cryer: Well, think of it in a simple term of if you were listening to a, a radio back, back in the days when we listened to radios, you could listen to a station that was full of static.

So you were having a hard time hearing the song or hearing the person that was talking, and that's confusing. It's disorienting and it's. You could also find a station that was super clear and playing this glorious symphony or this beautiful song, and now you're feeling, ah, there we go. Ah. So we all would know kind of from our own experience.

Similarly, you could be standing in New York City on any day. I think, whoa, the intensity was coming at me. You could also drive an hour away and be on a beach with nobody else there. And suddenly it's like, ah, there we go. Ah, so which, which do you want? All the noise being generated and the heart's not the fault.

It's not like, oh, damn, our hearts, why our hearts doing this to us. It's really our outta control emotions that are doing it, but the heart's an amplifier, the heart's. Part of that system. So it's amplifying what we're feeling. So unless we can regulate what we're feeling and move out of the, the constant stress or frustration or worry, which does take some training and some practice and move into appreciating more and having more gratitude, then the internal, environment going on radically changes, right?

So you're either feeding your whole body and brain, all this static, all this noise. And the biochemistry of fight or flight.

[00:18:15] Simon Vetter: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:16]  Bruce Cryer: Which would be appropriate if right now the, the room was burning, but it's not. So I don't care who is gonna text me. I don't re, I don't need that response.

[00:18:26] Simon Vetter: How have you applied this concept in your own life?

For creativity, for your own personal fulfillment or do you also have an example how you applied this in an organization where you help people kind to understand this dynamic and enhance their performance?

[00:18:43]  Bruce Cryer: on a personal level, a lot of it has come down to the idea that I wanna be more, grateful and loving person.

as a father, I wanna listen better as a, partner, as a lover, I wanna. Be more responsive. I wanna be more receptive. I wanna be, be in a mode that people wanna be around me, not like I'm, I'm demanding attention or trying to rule, others. So a lot of that has just been every moment I need to remember it.

Like, if I'm feeling a little tense about something, if I'm feeling a little bit, anxious about a, a conversation I had with someone, that's the the moment to bring my attention to my heart and take some slow, not overly slow, but just breathe in for about five seconds like you were breathing through your heart, and then just breathe out for about five seconds.

And just that process, especially when you combine that with. My daughter or I was the house sitting recently for a gorgeous little cat named Lucy. Oh, Lucy. You know, it doesn't matter. Your grandma focus on something that you genuinely love or or grateful for. It could have been the concert last Friday night that was like.

Awesome, epic and you wanna relive that. So that's what we're doing. So that's how I apply it is finding simple ways. I put myself in nature a lot. I go on hikes a lot. I take my camera, my camera being my iPhone. And I, I photograph spectacular nature, partly because I wanna experience it. I wanna go places where it's spectacular to, to feel that.

But I also wanna capture it to remember it, and I wanna share with others 'cause they're not getting outside enough. Probably most people aren't. so part of it is, is to just remember to, to do this idea of I wanna be a good person, I wanna be a loving person, I wanna be a kind person. And that is actually strength that I'm building, not weakness.

[00:20:32] Simon Vetter: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:32]  Bruce Cryer: So that's, that's a little snapshot. There's much more I could say about how I apply personally now when it comes to, to, to groups. You know, there's this whole model that, we developed years ago called Inner Quality Management, IQM for sure. And it, there were several principles when you work in an organization.

One is making sure I personally am more self-managed and now the term self-regulation or emotional regulation has become very popular because of our nervous systems that dysregulate a lot. Because life is getting crazier and crazier and crazier. Our nervous systems as a result are kind of fritzing a lot.

So we get overwhelmed, we get more tired, we get more fatigued, more exhausted. So, these principles apply. So in the context of an organization, I want individuals to have an understanding of how to manage themselves because they are humans. They are fathers, they're brothers, they're sisters, they're mothers, they're whoever they are.

They've got a life beyond the work. But they've also, they're also working in the context of other people, whether they work remotely or, or work, directly. And so we, we were able to adapt these principles of coherence to how we communicate. So exercises of making sure, for example, let's say you and I were, were team members, I would make sure if you were speaking up in a meeting, I would make sure I heard you appropriately, especially if you were a quieter member of a team.

So one of the things I learned in working with tons and tons of teams around the world was the quieter ones are quiet, partly because they often have felt unheard. So they don't like the why, why bother? They're not gonna hear me anyway. So as a leader, I said, I have gotta make sure, especially the quiet ones are feeling heard.

Feeling heard by me. If they feel heard by me, that's gonna open the, the, the floodgates of them sharing more. 'cause oftentimes, the, the most creative people in many teams are the quietest ones because for whatever reason, they may not be as extroverted. They may not be as, as talkative, and they've probably been shut down enough, enough times.

So they go, why bother? They're not gonna listen to me anyway. Well, that kills the team. That kills creativity. So being able to make sure another person is heard is a big part of how that,impacts teams. And then in our model, this affects the culture. So it's not just about me or me and my team, but it's also our division or like, what's the culture?

Is, is the vibe in the place genuinely supportive, genuinely respectful, genuinely a place that people would wanna come and work? Or is it all about command and control and, well, you can't do the job. Find another job. You don't like it around here. Well, this is the rules of the game around here. We don't actually care about your feedback because we're gonna do it the way we wanna do it anyway.

You know, so addressing those kinds of things. So there's a, there's kind of a whole model of how we began to work and applying the idea of coherence, going from the chaotic noise, internal dialogue to a much smoother and coherent does not mean passive. This is something, I think it's been I important over the years.

'cause sometimes people will say, well, you're breathing slowly. It sounds like I'm gonna get super relaxed. And surgeons would tell us and we'd work with hospitals. I don't wanna be relaxed. I've gotta be super alert. And we would say coherence is not relaxation. Relaxation is slowing the heart rate way down.

And that's like really getting like.

Relaxing like a nap or a, or a sleep or something. Coherence means you can be an EMTA first responder and go into an incredibly dangerous or, or chaotic situation and still function at a high level. 'cause you are the eye of the hurricane. You are the calm in the storm.

I was in a situation once a number of years ago where sitting outside in a cafe enjoying a summer afternoon here in California, suddenly a car comes up over the curb. The, the driver's side door pops open, and this lady staggers out of the car screaming. She thinks she's having a, a heart attack. My friend and I were the closest ones to this lady.

She survived. The whole thing was ended up fine, but the point of the story was, luckily we were. 200 yards from the fire station and therefore the responders, we dialed 9 1 1 right away while we tried to help her calm down. But the, the big burly first responder guy who came in was just a picture of calm.

It's kind of like another day at the job. I know exactly what to do, ma'am. We're gonna take good care of you. He was not chaotic like she was, he was not trying to convince her, oh, just calm the frick down. Didn't know. He was just like, calm. He walked in, calm, absolutely in charge. Not relaxed, but focused.

So coherence is this. It's not tense, it's not that kind of energy, but it's focused. And so we had a lot of surgeons realizing, ah, I get it. Focus is different than relax. Relax is not bad, but do relax when you, when lives are not at stake.

[00:25:30] Simon Vetter: You have a, a creative background, dancing, singing, and you also work with people to kinda spark that inner joy, that creativity.

how do you do that?

[00:25:41]  Bruce Cryer: Well, I had the, I had some wild experiences in my life and, and I had, cancer, I had staph infections that resulted from the treatments for the cancer. Fast forward to today. I'm now coming up on 16 years, cancer free. 15, just, just past 15 years. Staph, infection free. 14 years on titanium, new titanium hips.

So I went through a lot of stuff and in the, in the aftermath of that. This urge to create sprang up again. I hadn't really sung in many years. I hadn't sung publicly in many years. Even though I'd been on stage on Broadway, I hadn't danced at all. 'cause my hips were, were not good. And, but now I all that was taken care of, little by little, like my body was saying, no, no, it's time to sing again, dude.

It's time to dance again. Let's go for it. And so, this creative urge. Was reawaken and people would tell me, you're like a Renaissance man. You're like, you're singing again. We didn't even know you could sing. You're dancing again and, and you had to couple of life-threatening conditions that you survived.

So that was not lost on me. I. And I found this creative urge awakening, and I also stepped down as CEO of HeartMath at the time because I felt like something is needing to change and I'm not exactly sure what it is yet. I didn't know how much I wanted to sing and dance, but once I started it was like.

Dude, you're not putting that genie back in the bottle. This is a big part of who you are, and it hasn't been lately. You need to kind of get back into that. So I embraced the idea that I and all humans are fully creative beings. I don't consider myself more creative, even though I have it. A couple of things that I do that are public.

Public creativity, being a dancer, being a singer, being an actor, that sounds, oh wow, you're a creative person. I'm saying, show me a single mom with three kids who's making it work. That's creativity. She may not sing, she may not dance, she may not write poetry, but I, but she's making a symphony of her life that's just as creative, if not more so.

It's one thing when your creativity gets applause, it's another thing when your creativity gets no applause, except the the satisfaction that I'm, I'm taking care of my kids. So my point is that we're all creative. Every human being, we're born to create life. Whether we create another life isn't even the point.

That urge to create is why we wanna. Try a new job, try a new career. Sing when we haven't sung in 25 years. Dance when we haven't danced. You know, try take a painting class. I, I used to, I used to think I liked painting. Maybe I, maybe I will again. So I started see, to create a course thanks to Stanford.

[00:28:15] Simon Vetter: I started painting about five years ago, just really ran into a, a painting studio and I started painting and I surprised myself how creative I am because I haven't painted since I 18 years old. So yeah, to your point, we all are creative and we all have that creative. Juices and spirit in us. Sometimes

[00:28:37]  Bruce Cryer: I think it's a natural, natural decline that happens because as kids, it's E, it's so much easier to embrace all that because what are your responsibilities to go to school, more or less, do what your parents want you to do and the teachers, but there's a lot of freedom to just.

Play on the playground to pick up something and make it make a painting in the sand. I mean, there's, there's a freedom and an energy that comes with that, that we gradually think, I don't have time for that anymore. I can't, I now have responsibility. Now I'm a parent, now I got a mortgage.

[00:29:07] Simon Vetter: How do we infuse that creative side in a, in a work environment?

How do we. Get people inspired to be creative and, and also that intuitive side because that's part of the, the creativity. How do we foster that in a, in a workplace where we gotta deliver and produce?

[00:29:26]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah, this is gonna sound maybe a little bit counterintuitive, but in my opinion, the the best energy to enhance creativity in a workplace is the energy of playfulness.

Playfulness. And I mean, I think in, for the last 20, 30 years. You often would hear about these really innovative companies where Patagonia, for years, they were kind of a, a star. You know, there are lots of examples, but the workplace was different. It was more playful. Dogs were there, you know, whatever.

There, there wasn't the old totally controlled, you gotta be nose to the grindstone the entire time. Of course, now un unless you're on Facebook or whatever you where, or, or you're doing AI on your, on your phones. But I think. Allowing and encouraging a playful attitude in the workplace, even though that could sound like, well, how are you gonna get your a job done if you're, if you're being all playful?

Well, the other day I had a significant issue I had to call customer service about, and the lady happened to be in South Africa. That's where the call went. I recognize the South African accent. We had a conversation around South Africa. And it was because Nelson Mandela and I shared the same birthday, and it was wow, the day after my birthday, his birthday, my birthday, I happened to recognize the accent.

My point being, I was trying to be playful with this person, even though I was the one with the problem, I had done something wrong, and now I had to deal with the consequences, but I thought, I'm gonna just connect to this person as a person. When I recognized the accent, I thought, interesting. She's in South Africa, she probably knows that was his birthday.

And sure enough, the whole country celebrates his birthday the day before. So my point being, and she, later on she said, you made my day. Thank you. Thank you for this goal. You know, just bringing it, just even noticing an accent and recognizing it was South African, she, she felt like, wow. You knew that said, yeah, I've been there a bunch of times.

I love your country. I wish I could go back soon. So my point being, being flexible. Being spontaneous, allowing yourself to create a moment. She will probably talk about that. She probably won't forget that. You know, hopefully she has many more great moments. But I wanted to kind of create a moment. Just, just my heart said, create a moment.

She's in South Africa. I love South Africa. I have this unique connection to it thanks to the, the modern day founder of it. And so, but that takes a, a playful energy to do that. And when I was CEO of HeartMath. I would sometimes not tell inappropriate jokes, but make, but make comments that were like, you really just said that.

Not, not that they were off color, but like, but they were like lighthearted. Because I, I'd say we have to be, we, we are all of these parts of ourselves. We are not just the part that is mentally focused on tasks. that is one frequency that we are capable of and, and may be needed, but trust me, if that's all you do, you are a narrow human and you're probably gonna contribute in a very narrow way to an organization.

[00:32:18] Simon Vetter: And you use the word lighthearted.

[00:32:20]  Bruce Cryer: Exactly.

[00:32:21] Simon Vetter: It has to do with coherence. And if we are heavy hearted, it creates a different energy.

[00:32:27]  Bruce Cryer: Exactly. Exactly. So again, I think it's, it's not me. It's not meaning you, you suddenly we're, we're all taking out crayons and colored markers all the time and just being, being five-year-olds, that's not what I mean by playful.

But the energy when, when friends are together, having a good time, that energy of having fun together and recognizing a lot of times because of what you just said, the heavy heart, the heavy heartedness, that's, that creates a block on the creativity.

[00:32:55] Simon Vetter: Yeah,

[00:32:55]  Bruce Cryer: I call, playfulness, the wonder drug of creativity

I love watching men, especially adult men, in the presence of young children who are being completely playful and are making up stories left and right about these imaginary characters they're all playing with. And then the adult has to kind of join in, in the language and the, but they will do it. And, but, but deny that, no, I shouldn't, I shouldn't be that way.

But then they'll get down there and start talking in a funny voice. I say, it's in you dude. It is in you. Don't, don't keep rejecting it, that energy. I'm not saying you gotta walk around in, in funny voices all the time, but I'm saying that energy of being able to be playful when the, when the moment needs it to lighten the air to be, create the sparkle that I know what we should do now because you have lightened the environment.

[00:33:44] Simon Vetter: Now you have so much tremendous knowledge and experience, expertise, around those topics. What are couple of simple practices that you advise the listeners to apply today, tomorrow, next week? To really kind of be more lighthearted, more creative, more inspired, and create that culture and environment around us.

[00:34:07]  Bruce Cryer: Well, lighthearted and inspired more creative to me. many of us. Huge, huge percentage. I have no idea what the numbers are. It doesn't matter. A huge number of us are way too sedentary. We're we're sitting at our desks in front of our computers or our devices way too much. And, and, and I, I, I point out we're kind of in this shape, meaning, oh shape.

That's not, that's not the shape of flow. That's the shape of angles and restriction and, and then we wonder why We have a hard time coming up with creative ideas. And sometimes I'll say, I'll say to myself, dude, get outta your fricking chair. Walk outside. Get some fresh air. Look at a sun. Look at the sunshine.

Look at a flower, look at a tree. Just get yourself into another environment, but move. Specifically move. We are designed to move.

[00:34:55] Simon Vetter: Yeah,

[00:34:55]  Bruce Cryer: we are the first generation that thinks we're supposed to be sitting most of the time in front of devices that are not organic. Like,

[00:35:03] Simon Vetter: yeah,

[00:35:03]  Bruce Cryer: like this is supposed to be normal.

Well, it never was for tens of thousands of years, so it's not, not really normal. It's not really healthy. So getting up and moving is, is very simple, but we have to remind ourselves, kinda like the, the watch that goes off on the hour, you may need to do that. Set a reminder on your computer to get up and stretch.

Get up and turn on a piece of music that you love, but we're not moving enough. And so the energy in us tends to kind of pool up and get stuck. and it often is very mental. 'cause if we're just sitting and we're just focused on information coming in, back and forth, back and forth, we're very much up here.

We're not in the more spacious, ah. What do we do? Like why do companies take their, their people teams on retreats? Why do they take 'em out to con the country? They think they will think better. Why is that? Well, they're not in their normal routine, number one. Number two, they're out in nature. Number three, they're having a good time.

'cause it's not the usual rules and routines of the of the workplace. Why wouldn't that be like the na, the way we should be working on a, on a regular basis, getting outside, having a little more informality, a little more casual attitudes, little more playfulness. The same reason we go on retreats. We should be doing that.

So take yourself on retreat.

[00:36:17] Simon Vetter: Yep. Standing meetings, meetings outside, and I do a lot of podcast listening when I go and take a walk and get inspired. So yeah, be creative in terms of movement and integrate some of the learning and, and work into moving exercises.

[00:36:35]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah. And, and like all, all that we said at the beginning of this, of this conversation around heart coherence, when we are locked in, our heads locked onto devices.

Are there any warm feelings going on in us those times? But what are you, do you have people that you love in your life? Uhhuh. So then, but you haven't thought about 'em in days. So then why are you doing all this? Have you thought about the, the plants in your garden that you love to see when you go home at night?

No. You haven't thought about, you wait till you get home. But why don't you bring it into the, into the, the, the day? Because it's now in the day when we actually need that energy, especially not just later, once it's over. Like bringing the feelings of a vacation into our day. Not, not just waiting until the two weeks at the end of the year.

[00:37:21] Simon Vetter: What's your vision for the next few years? What are you excited about? Where you wanna focus your energy towards?

[00:37:28]  Bruce Cryer: Well, I've, I've developed this new system. It's really a kind of next generation of, in my own evolution from the HeartMath and the creativity, and I call it VYBRATO. VYBRATO. And it came to me as it was, I was literally walking on the beach having a evacuated from a category five hurricane that was coming to Florida where I was living.

And I was at that moment dealing with kidney stones and U-T-I urinary tract infection. So I was in a lot of pain. I had evacuated my home because of the hurricane category five huge and feeling some despair, and I felt like when I tune into the world, all of whom were not going through a hurricane, but they were going through their own things.

[00:38:07] Simon Vetter: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:08]  Bruce Cryer: They were not all going through kidney stones, but they were going through their own things. I'm thinking the world needs more ways to let go of what's building up in us. We're in a time where I don't care your political views, I don't care where you are in the world. There is more. Pressure on us than ever.

More reasons to feel, angry or feel isolated or whatever. And so to me, we have to let go more often. We have to, and there's something designed into our body called a sigh of relief. I've, I, I've renamed a tech, I've created a technique I call the wave of relief. And the idea is that through a day, our body wants us to release.

And that's why we have the instinct to go, ah, oh, that job's done. Ah, great. Ah, now I can relax. No, you should have relaxed a while ago, but yes, now you can relax. So I'm on this mission to say we are all at levels of overwhelm. This's really not sustainable. And we know that, but we don't really know what to do.

Or we kind of do, but it's, but how do we sustain what we know to do? 'cause there's so many pressures and so much just noise in the, in the environment. So this concept of VYBRATO is to basically add positive waves to life instead of just. Just feeling bad when the wave hits us of, oh, I can't believe that just happened.

I can't believe that was just announced. Like, oh no, not another one. You know those waves that are hitting us and we are recoiling and recoiling and, and getting exhausted. My intuition, my heart told me we gotta start generating more waves. We gotta start counteracting some of that. We're not gonna be able to change the people making many of these decisions that are horrible to us.

But what we can change is what's happening inside us. And that does have to do with, are we gonna be t taken under by the wave hitting us? Or are we gonna start generating more waves of, of positivity and more care to others and more care to ourselves? Put ourselves out in the garden, put ourselves out on the beach, put ourselves out in the sunshine to create new waves instead of the waves just kind of folding in on us and feeling heavier and heavier and more and more tired.

So I'm passionate about that because I, I think, you know, just like. human progress is possible even at a time of a lot of darkness, and I think we know a lot more about what the body's capable of and, and the compared to when we were starting 35 years ago. I mean, it's like a completely new world of understanding what's, what's possible.

Along with that, a lot of people, a lot more hopeful, but then there's billions more that are still feeling stuck and feeling unempowered and, and everything else. So I, I, I, I do believe that part of, of what I'm saying is part of an answer that we, we have to learn how to let go of things. It's, it's too easy to hang on to the hurt, the anger, the frustration, the, the feeling of suffering, understandably so, especially if something bad has occurred that.

People were hurt. But the more we hang onto it, the more it's depleting us without our really awareness that's happening. And so, and to our, to our detriment of course, in terms of our health, in terms of our attitude to life. You know, how many times do people say, oh, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

You know, like, like they're feeling all the negativity and then they, they knew another one would happen and sure enough it did. And ah, there we go.

[00:41:28] Simon Vetter: Yeah.

[00:41:29]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah,

[00:41:29] Simon Vetter: definitely. There's a lot of demands, pressure, stress, exactly. From the outside. And I think over the part of me being a coach and a trainer and, and, and learner is taking the opportunity to heal the heart.

' cause the heart is a powerful organ, but it's also the, the emotions and the, the. Everything around the heart and I think using

[00:41:53]  Bruce Cryer: exactly

[00:41:53] Simon Vetter: healing as an opportunity to, like a pressure wolf that we don't have to add more pressure. Yes, we are able to release exactly the pressure and, and, and re kind of transfer that energy into some good, loving, caring energy.

Yeah. How do you do that? Gimme a brief. Overview of this VYBRATO concept.

[00:42:16]  Bruce Cryer: So the, the kind of cornerstone technique I call the wave of relief, and it's based on this idea that when we're really, oh, thank God I don't have to deal with that, or, oh wow, our team won. When I was in my cancer period, , the surgery had happened a month later, there's a, there's an important test to make sure nothing that was coming back.

And I felt really good. I felt like, wow, he, my doctor did what we hoped he got the tumor. I think I'm, I think I really felt like I was good. I was waiting to get the call from, from the doctor about the test results, and finally, and I'm feeling positive and I finally get the call, and he, right away he gets on and says, Bruce, good news for you.

The test came back negative. Well, I had been feeling, I was really positive, and then what happened was, oh, thank God. I mean, there's this huge release, way bigger than I would've thought. I thought I, I kinda, I, I, I got, I got this. We're on, we're we're good. But then my body told me, told a whole nother story.

No, dude, you were carrying a lot of energy in there as you could, would, I mean, you're human. No gi, no guilt. You're, you're a normal human. Of course you would, but acknowledge that so that you can deal with it. So this, sigh of relief, which is what my whole body did, is a mechanism built into our, how we are built as humans, which is why every athlete who did just about any sport at some point goes.

They do that in the batter's box at in, in golfing, in tennis, in gymnastics, in swimming, you name it. At some point they know I've gotta let go in order to, so the, the, the wave of relief was based around nature. And I'm basically saying, imagine you're standing at the beach and it's gorgeous summer day and warm breeze, and the water's great and, and you're breathing in that energy.

A nice deep breath, like bigger than a normal inhale. And then you're letting go, like, ah, let go. Like I felt when the, when the news was, the test is negative, dude, just letting go, but you're letting go to the sea because you, again, you're imagining you're, it's like you're with the waves. So the waves are bringing in you all the good, bringing to you all the great energy.

And then as you release, remember the waves go out just as much as they come in. They go out just as much as they come in. Or we would all be underwater. I love to say that. So helping people remember just as energy can come into us, that feels great. Just also the sea takes stuff away from us.

[00:44:46] GMT20250722-220724_Recording_640x360: Yeah.

[00:44:46]  Bruce Cryer: So you can use this imagery as a way to release what's otherwise holding on in your belly.

A lot of people, a lot of us hang, feel tension, anxiety in the belly. Maybe it's in the shoulders, maybe in the chest, wherever it is, wherever we're holding on that simple process. Breathe in, like you're standing at the at the warm sea. And then just letting it go. Letting it go. Like a true sigh of relief.

And you eat that several, several times. When you first try it, you realize I'm still holding on. It might take eight or 10. Yeah. And you see guys, I'm still holding on. Damn, that thing hold. Wants to hold on like crazy. I said, yeah, you've been doing a long time. Cut yourself some slack. It's okay. We all do it.

We're all, we can all wink at each other. We all do this. It's no big deal.

[00:45:31] Simon Vetter: I love all your ideas and tools and stories. How can we learn more about your expertise and your Librado concept?

[00:45:42]  Bruce Cryer: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I'm, I, I use my name, I don't have anything other than my name, Bruce k Crier. And so that's my name on LinkedIn, on my website, bruce kreer.com.

On, Instagram, on YouTube, on Facebook. Bruce Kreer. So I'm, I'm in a lot of places and, on LinkedIn. For those of you who are listeners who are on, on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter on LinkedIn called Future You, where I talk about these ideas in more depth. several thousand people subscribe to that.

And I, I get on podcasts like seeing my old friends every so often. Like, like you today, Simon. So, I have podcasts, a lot of links to podcasts on my, bruce kreer.com site. And I, and I have a new thing, uh, store, called stand.store. Slash Bruce Pryor and it's a very cool new store concept, stand store slash Bruce Pryor.

And it kind of gives lots of free things, links as well as digital things that you can just order or it's like, it's got a Cal Calendar function too, so people could like literally schedule a appointment with me all through this stand source slash Bruce Kreer. So.

[00:46:47] Simon Vetter: Awesome.

[00:46:48]  Bruce Cryer: Find me.

[00:46:49] Simon Vetter: Thank you so much. I'm grateful for our chat today.

I'm gonna get up, get outside. I'm gonna move, do some breathing.

[00:46:58]  Bruce Cryer: Excellent.

[00:46:58] Simon Vetter: And I'm gonna incorporate that. So,

Much appreciated.

[00:47:01]  Bruce Cryer: My pleasure.