 So thank you all for joining the Agile India Light event. This is kind of our preview event, if you will, just for all of us to get a feel for what the virtual event would look like. My name is Nareesh Jain. I'm the founder of the Agile India, started back in 2004. It's been an incredible journey over the last, I would say 16 years now. And this year is very special. It's also, all of us are going through this very strange time in our lives. And we're getting to experiment with things that we probably would have not experimented anytime soon. So that's why I said it's kind of special. And we have Linda with us, who will be joining us in a minute. There we have Linda is with us. Thanks Linda for joining in this morning. Linda has been a great inspiration for all of us. Her work on Fearless Change, I'm sure most of you who are in the audience have read her work or at least have been influenced by her work. She's a very regular speaker at Agile India, not a new face in that sense. And we are really honored to have you, Linda here. Thanks for joining in. My pleasure. Without too much of you, I will hand it over to you, Linda. Okay, so let's see if we can really do this. On the first slide, you've got my contact information. So if things go wrong in the middle of this and you want to see this presentation, please send me some email, linda at lindarising.org and I'll be happy to send you the entire presentation. You can do anything you want with it. This is about expressive writing. But we all know what this is. It's the virus that has us currently in lockdown. It's the virus that has made sure that we have to use all of these different apps in communicating with each other. We have to be online. We can't be for real. So we know how stressful this is and we know what a lot of us have been doing. We have been cleaning out our closets. We've been organizing our offices and for me, this meant trying to organize all the books that I own. I have too many books or I prefer not enough bookshelves. You cannot have too many books. And in doing that, I found several books, including this one, I had started to read on a trip, brought home, put on my bookshelf, meaning to finish, but somehow had gotten lost. So this was Serendipity because this book changed my life. In the middle of the lockdown, I found a book with real research, real science to help me get through this very troublesome period. It's a book called Opening Up and it was written by James Pennebaker. I've got his website so that you can go look for more publications if you're interested in this research. And in his work, he talks about addressing something called social anxiety, which is what we are all suffering now, social anxiety. We know that we live in a stressful time. We know the pandemic has created a lot of stress for all of us. We are in lockdown with our families. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It's the body's natural response to a situation where we must take action. And involved with that response are a collection of hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, cytokines, histamines. And when we're under stress, all of those hormones increase. And that's what we feel when we feel stressed is the high level of all those hormones. And those hormones in a short-term situation allows us to take action, to run away, to do something about the stress. But when these hormones are sustained for a long time, and that's what we are suffering now, then our immune system is compromised and we are more open to a whole host of illnesses, including viruses. We know that the current virus has been identified. We have a name for it, COVID-19. We also know there's no cure. We know there's no vaccine yet. We know a lot of people are working on vaccines and I have a lot of friends who are in trials. But as yet, no success. So the only way we have to fight this virus is with our own defenses, our healthy immune systems. So under stress, we are all suffering from anxiety. Those hormones that are elevated are stressing out our immune system and destroying our ability to defend against this virus. In other words, the anxiety we feel right now is compromising our only defense against this virus. We need to do something to reduce the stress, to reduce the levels of hormones. The research that James Penn and Baker did started in the 1980s. So we are talking about decades of research. Decades of research around the power of what Penn and Baker calls expressive writing. And in that research, he has uncovered a benefit that we all should pay attention to now. That expressive writing has the ability to improve the immune system. It has the ability to reduce those levels of hormones to improve our stressful situations. And he's identified a series of steps that we all can take. It's easy, it costs nothing and the power for what we are facing now is overwhelming. What we know from research that does not work is ignoring it, denying it, saying, oh, it will go away soon. Trying to be positive, I'm a positive thinker. I believe in optimism, but that is not enough. Distracting ourselves with too much screen time, watching hours and hours of television or eating, we are all eating too much. Or running the scenario in our head of the worst possible case, venting over and over and over again, telling our family what we think will be the worst possible outcome. Or blaming, blaming our political leaders, blaming our healthcare providers, blaming the environment, blaming other people. We know all of these things that we are all doing do not work. Let's look at the very first experiment that Pennebaker did, this was back in 1983. Since then, there have been dozens and dozens and dozens of experiments validating this result. The very first time he did it, he randomly assigned two students to two groups. One group was the experimental group. They were told to write about a traumatic event. If we were writing today, we would definitely write about the pandemic. The control group was just asked to write about their ordinary schedule, what they do every day. One of the things they tracked in this experiment was how many of these students visited the healthcare facility in the months following. And what they saw was an enormous difference. Those students who were in the experimental group who wrote about trauma had half the illness related visits to the health center in the six months following the experiment. But the real benefit was those in the experimental group who'd had a chance to write about a trauma said, they felt better, they slept better. They were more optimistic about the future. A lot of benefits ensued from this simple first experiment that led Pennebaker to wonder what he had really found. We paired up with two, this is a long word, psycho neuro immunologists. It was a husband and wife team at Ohio State University and he repeated the experiment. That is he randomly assigned people to two groups. One group was going to write about a trauma. The other about something superficial. But now something extra, they were going to try to measure those levels of stress hormones. Remember the ones we talked about originally? Cortisol, a whole host of other hormones that increase in times of stress. These students had blood samples taken the day before they wrote, after they finished writing and six weeks later. And now in addition to the earlier benefits, now they could actually measure levels of stress hormones and what they found was a market decrease. That meant these students had enhanced their immune function by the simple act of writing about the trauma. Experiment that caught my eye had to do with computers. There's a bunch of computer engineers much later in 1994. There had been significant layoffs at a computer company. It had to remain anonymous so I don't know the name of the company, but they laid off over 100 senior level engineers. The average age was 52 and this foremost was the only job these engineers had ever had. What they found was after four months, none of these 100 engineers had found a new job. So the out placement organization that was working with the engineers contacted Pennebaker and said, would you please try to help? We're not having any luck finding jobs for these people. We wonder, could your technique help these engineers who are going through, well it is a trauma, it is anxiety producing. So this time Pennebaker did something different. He randomly assigned the 100 engineers to three groups. One of them wrote about the trauma, the trauma of course of being laid off, losing your job at 52, not knowing whether you will ever work again. And then two control groups, one that wrote about an ordinary topic and one that did not write at all. What he found was that three months later, 27% of those who wrote had found jobs. Only 5% of the control groups, hardly anything. Seven months later, over half of the experimental group had found jobs, less than a fifth in the control groups. And all of this while every individual engineer had the same number of job interviews. So finally, after the seven months measurement, they said we should have the people in the control group also try expressive writing. The benefits were so obvious. Why did this happen? The explanation is simple. Those who'd had a chance to write about it and there are some rules to follow for expressive writing, it allowed them to come to terms with the hostility, the anger, the frustration. They were unhappy of course. They felt the company had let them down. So when they went on a job interview, all of that anger, all of that frustration came out. They were hostile. They were denigrating of the company. Whereas those who had had a chance to write about it, had moved on, were able to show their best selves in the interview and therefore more likely to get the job. Well, here are the instructions. You can send for this PowerPoint or you can remember this, it's not super complicated. The instructions are every day for four or five days in a row, write for 15 to 20 minutes. Pick your topic right now, it's how can we survive this pandemic, I would imagine. Use a pen or a pencil and paper that works best and just write. Don't worry about grammar, punctuation, whether it makes any sense, just keep writing. Write continuously. If you feel that you don't have anything more to say, start over again. Don't ever feel that you wanna share this with anybody. This is for you alone. In fact, the best technique for most seems to be to destroy it when you've finished. If something seems too painful, if it's too hard to write about, if it's too difficult to express, then don't stop. Some who do this exercise feel a little sad, especially on the first day after writing. This will pass, but it's a necessary transition. It's the gate through which you have to pass. Write about some kind of stressful situation. Talk about the facts, what happened? How did you feel about it? Write about as much as you can. Even if you're reluctant to talk about it or to say anything about it to anyone else, this is your chance to get it out. Talk about how it makes sense in some way. Your brain is equipped to make up a story about your life. How does this traumatic event fit into that story? If it doesn't make sense yet, say how it might make sense, how you might think about it, how you might deal with it. Stay writing for 15 to 20 minutes. Keep going for four or five days. All right, if you have trouble writing and you'd rather type, you can do that or record. That's okay. Pen and pencil are best. The evidence is clear. We do better with a real pen or pencil and real paper. There are now dozens and dozens and dozens of experiments that have been performed since the 1980s. They have all validated Pennebaker's results. They show the enormous benefit of this very simple technique. It's been used with people with post-traumatic syndrome. Students, of course, lots of students, but adults, those who've been laid off, criminals, people with serious illnesses, with a variety of problems and the results are always the same. People feel better, they are healthier by every measurement. This is something we are all suffering with right now. We don't sleep well. It's where I first used Pennebaker's technique. Instead of tossing and turning, wondering what was going to happen in the world, I simply got up, went into my office, set my timer and began to write. It saved my life. That's why I'm here telling you about this because I know you're going through this as well. You can't sleep, you're suffering from anxiety. You're tired of going around and around and telling the same people, including your family. And I'd like you to have some simple things that you can do that will help you. We know that simply talking about it doesn't help, but writing, it's better than counting sheep, it's better than alcohol before you go to bed, it's better than sleeping tablets. Just get up and write. Now this is not going to save everything, not going to make the world a better place. It takes time to recover from any trauma. We know that there's a net positive effect. We know that most people feel better, but this is not magic. There isn't any magic for people who are suffering trauma. What they've learned over time, over the decades in this research is that those who somehow begin to make sense to create a story around the traumatic event do better. You can see it in the writing when they begin to say, now I understand, now I see, now I make sense of, those who find some meaning survive better, they become more resilient. It doesn't mean that the traumatic event was a good thing in their lives. Often people ask, what if I want to keep writing for more than 20 minutes? Well, keep on writing. What if you want to keep going after four days? Do it. What's the best time of day? Typically either first thing in the morning or if you are working on a regular schedule when you're at the end of the work day. But you should experiment. You should find what's best for you. What's the difference between this and writing in a journal? And the answer is a journal is typically just a record of what happened over the course of the day. And there are plenty of examples of executives around the world who keep records journals. They're valuable things. But the benefit of journaling almost always points back to Pennebaker's research. And he was not talking about journaling. He was talking about traumatic experiences and using what he calls expressive writing. But if journaling helps you, do it. Pennebaker found that writing before stressful situation is also valuable. People who are anxious about taking tests, about giving online presentations, about going through any stressful event, surgery, difficult medical procedures, if they write about it, immediately before going through the stressful event, they have a better experience. There's been now research even on Holocaust survivors, people who have survived horrible things and even decades later, having a chance to write about it shows profound results. There are a lot of studies on the benefits of real pen and paper. If you're still glued to that laptop, I'd be happy to send these to you. We are hardwired to write on cave walls. Typing in a laptop, well, it's okay. I know a lot of organizations, especially Google, they don't want laptops in meetings or cell phones. We know that you do better when you have a real pen in your hand and you write on real paper and even better if you can draw. I'm not much of an artist, but drawing does help. We know this works because your brain is hardwired to make sense out of events. And Expressive Writings allows you to do that. Until you make sense of it, you do what's called venting or replaying. You go over and over the details of what's been going on. Writings slows you down. It allows you to step by step, complete one thought and then another. So Expressive Writings works with your brain. To help you do what you do best, which is make sense out of any trauma. There was a recent article in Harvard Business Review. If you can't find this online, I'll be happy to send it to you. We're saying that we are in a stage of grief and the scary thing about it is what we're going through now is just the beginning. Most of us will make it through, but it's afterwards. Afterwards, we might go through post trauma, grief. And that's when a lot of problems will show up. So I'm hoping that you will latch onto Expressive Writings whenever you need it, now or later. It's like having ibuprofen in your medicine cabinet. Whenever you need it, it's there. It's absolutely free. You don't have to pay for online counseling. You are your best physician. Set the timer, get a pen and paper, start writing. A good friend of mine who's a psychotherapist is very busy these days. And he says, he gives the same advice to everyone. He says, write every day, walk every day. Okay. All right, again, thanks a lot, Linda. This was awesome. Appreciate it and see you soon. Bye. Bye. Thanks everyone for joining. Take care, bye.