Welcome back to Season 12 of the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast! In episode 345, we continue our 18-week self-leadership series based on Grant Bosnick's tailored approaches. This week, we dive into Chapter 15, exploring the neuroscience of relationships and authenticity. We revisit key insights on relationship-building from past episodes and introduce the concept of authenticity, drawing on reflections from Andrea Samadi and insights from Mohamed Issa's forthcoming book. Learn what authenticity means, how it impacts our lives, and practical steps for fostering genuine connections with others. Discover the balance between the reflexive and reflective systems in our brain, and how understanding these can enhance our social interactions. Reflect on your unique gifts and talents, and find out how to nurture them to build deeper, more authentic relationships. Join us for an enlightening episode that blends neuroscience with practical advice, helping you to live a more authentic life and improve your personal and professional relationships. On today's episode #345 we continue with our 18-Week Self-Leadership Series based on Grant 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] the end of January. The goal was that each week, we focused on learning something new, (from Grant’s book) tied to the most current neuroscience research, that builds off the prior week, to help take us to greater heights in 2024. On today's EPISODE #345 “The Neuroscience of Relationships and Authenticity” we will cover: ✔ A review of one of our FIRST interviews, with Greg Wolcott EP #7, July 2019 on his book Significant 72 ✔ Ch. 15 from Grant Bosnick’s Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership book on “Relationships and Authenticity ✔ A review of Mo Issa’s definition of Authenticity from his book, The Shift: How to Awaken to the Aliveness Within ✔ The Neuroscience of Our Social Brain ✔ 4 Steps to Building More Authentic Relationships For Today, EPISODE #345, we are moving on to Chapter 15, reviewing “The Neuroscience of Relationships and Authenticity.” We’ve covered relationships on this podcast, right back to the beginning, with Greg Wolcott EP #7, (July 2019) with his book Significant 72: Unleashing the Power of Relationships in Today’s Classrooms. Greg Wolcott, an Assistant Superintendent from Chicago, IL, has dedicated his life to this topic through his work at Signficant72.com.[iii] It’s here where you can learn more about Greg’s Relationship Mindset Movement, his book, tools, and resources to improve student-teacher relationships in the classroom. Relationships are also one of the six social and emotional competencies that we built our podcast framework upon, knowing how important relationship skills are for our well-being and future success. “Social relationships—both quantity and quality—affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and (even our) mortality risk.”[iv] If you’ve taken the leadership self-assessment[v], look to see if Relationships and Authenticity (in Pathway 6, our final pathway in this book study) along with biases, trust and empathy is of a low, medium or high priority for you to focus on this year. I was not surprised to see this pathway is a high area of focus for me. While we have covered relationship building often on this podcast, the one topic we have NOT covered yet is authenticity. This is interesting timing for me, as I’m currently reading a book by a good friend, Mohammed Issa[vi], where he covers the topic of authenticity, in depth. It’s the title of chapter 8 of his forthcoming book, The Midlife Shift[vii] (Reclaiming My Authenticity). I remember years before Mo wrote this book, I could tell he was thinking deeply about this topic. In 2021 he sent me a message, and asked me “what does living an authentic life me