Welcome back to Season 11 of the "Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning" podcast. Our host, Andrea Samadi, an author and an educator, introduces a compelling 18-week series devoted to self-leadership, drawing on insights from Grant Bosnick's book on the subject. The series, framed through the lens of neuroscience and psychology, aims to empower listeners onto individual pathways of self-discovery. By building stronger and more resilient versions of oneself, we anticipate a transformation in well-being, achievement, productivity, and success. We lay the foundation of this self-discovery journey by looking within – nurturing self-awareness. It is a revisiting of ancient wisdom, as we echo Aristotle's words, "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." In conversation with Grant Bosnick, we ponder upon multiple facets of neuroscience and self-leadership. We hope this series evokes new revelations about our neural circuits, catalyzed by the application of neuroscience embedded in each lesson. Being self-aware, acknowledging and overcoming obstacles, and utilizing the forces that propel us, can transform our performance towards our goals in 2024. To fully grasp these concepts and apply them meaningfully, we highly recommend taking your own leadership self-assessment. Equipped with a nuanced understanding of personal strengths and areas of improvement, we hope to inspire a fresh, empowered approach to thinking and leading in 2024. Concluding with a powerful sentiment from Peter Drucker, "Being a self-leader is to serve as chief, captain, president, or CEO of one's own life"—we welcome you to join us in this journey of self-discovery and self-leadership, underpinned by the magnificent world of neuroscience. On today's episode #323 we will begin our Self-Leadership Series based on Grant ‘Upbeat’ Bosnick’s “Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership: A Bite Size Approach Using Psychology and Neuroscience” that we first dove into with our interview on EP #321.[i] During this interview, I told Grant that his book contained a thorough and deep overview of the Neuroscience of Self-Leadership, that I felt like each of the 18 chapters could be covered in 18 weeks, so I decided to set our season theme to the Neuroscience of Self-Leadership that will be our focus until June of this year. This series will help each of us on our pathways of self-discovery….to get to know ourselves on a deeper level as we build stronger more resilient versions of ourselves in 2024. Since we know that “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” Aristotle This is where our podcast began back on episode #2[ii] on Self-Awareness: Know Thyself where we covered 6 Steps for Becoming More Self-Aware back in July of 2019. Remember: Mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power” - Lao Tsu While speaking with Grant Bosnick on our recent interview, I let him know that I took his Self-Assessment to leadership that I’ve linked in the resource section below, and that when I was given my results, I scored very low on some areas where I think I might have answered the questions thinking “I’ve got this” (in my head) until I actually read his book, and realized there was much more to some of these areas than I thought. So, for the next 18 weeks, we are going to work through the science in Grant’s book, and see if we can together, apply the research he’s uncovered in his timeless self-leadership principles, to learn something NEW with ourselves, building stronger, more improved 2.0 versions of ourselves with whatever it is we are working on this year. I’m hoping that the science reveals something NEW that you might not have thought of in the past, like we mentioned on PART 4[iii] of our Review of The Silva Method, Dr. Andrew Huberman’s research taught us that “when we see something that’s truly creative, it reveals something to us about the natural world and about how our brains work. It must reveal so