Neuroscience researcher, resilience expert, author of Executive Resilience, and founder of Driven, an AI-powered resilience program used by hundreds of organisations worldwide, Jurie Rossouw talks about technological solutions for building more resilient public safety agencies and cultures and the High Adversity Resilience Training (HART) program he developed, which is in use by emergency responders and law enforcement agencies. Current neuroscientific understanding of traumatic stress and resilience. The need for good assessments and ongoing support and training rather than one-time training programs, including the use of apps and other new technologies like the AI-based Driven app. Training first responders to prepare them for high stress, high adversity situations and following through with ongoing support and training.
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Neuroscientific-Informed Resilience Training in Public Safety with Jurie Rossouw Transcript
Fleet Maull:
Hi! Welcome to another session on day five of the Global First Responder Resilience Summit. My name is Fleet Maull, your co-host. And today, we're focused on creating healthy agency cultures of resilience.
I'm really excited to be here today with Jurie Rossouw from Australia, who has done some amazing science-backed and AI-based work of really how to take resilience work to scale in agencies and organizations. So welcome, Jurie.
Jurie Rossouw:
Fantastic. Good to be here.
Fleet Maull:
It's great to have you. I'm going to share a bit of your background for our audience, so they get familiar with you, and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Okay?
Jurie Rossouw:
All right.
Fleet Maull:
Great. So, Jurie is a resilience expert and author of the book executive resilience, a book that delves into the neuroscience of cultural resilience. Jurie is also the founder of Driven, an integrated AI-powered resilience program that is used by hundreds of organizations worldwide, combining workshops, peer training, certifications, and technology to create comprehensive resilience cultures to build truly supportive environments.
Jurie has also developed High Adversity Resilience Training (HART), which is used by emergency responders and law enforcement agencies. Jurie has published multiple research papers on the neuroscience of resilience, resilience assessment, and new analytics frameworks to better understand the deeper functioning and value of resilience.
From that, I think our audience can easily see why we reached out and got you to be on this Summit. So again, welcome. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Please tell us a little bit about your background, how you got involved with neuroscientific-informed resilience training and went on to start Driven as a relatively recent startup and got into this whole AI-driven approach. I mean, it's really innovative, what you're doing. And so, how did all this come about?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah, thanks. I guess it started a long time ago in my own childhood, where I had my own interest in mental health and just trying to improve my own mindset. Through that, I started doing a whole lot of research into the different aspects of mental health and physical health. I ended up going into university around a bunch of different things, really. Everything from finance and eventually studied organizational psychology and later went into neuroscience as well. A lot of it was from my own interest in my own mindset. But then, as I was doing that, over in about ten years or so, I had so much research that I put together that really helped me.
It felt like it took too long for me to learn all these things. So, what if we can put it together into some kind of format that might be useful for other people to access that might make it a lot simpler. In many ways, it's me creating the program that I wish that I had access to all those years ago because I felt that if I could have had that very simple type of approach to use and to access this information in a more engaging way, I think it would have helped me a lot. So, that's where I started publishing more of the research that I did on the neuroscience of resilience.
What is it? How do we measure it? Where is it in the brain? How does it work? I'm putting together some books. As I was publishing all of that, I started talking more to people who are reading the books and reading the materials and thinking about more ways that we can use this in a way that might be more accessible for people because that's one of my big aims is how do we get this out to as many people as possible. And to be able to do that, we really need to have some type of way that is more accessible and more scalable. Especially economically, because we can't always do face-to-face coaching with everyone, as great as that would be, that'd be fantastic, just the financial barrier for that is quite big.
That's where the idea of a virtual coach came in. What if we could have some technology that people can turn to? They can open it up and use their phone and essentially have that type of coaching experience and have it more regularly. That's where I've already
been doing some work in application design and using technology, and then I thought, what if we use the kind of AI that's starting to form these days and put it all together alongside the neuroscience of resilience and those ideas and have it in an app, something that people can access anytime and use that to scale it out.
And then, of course, how do we reinforce it with all types of different approaches from making in-person workshops and things available. Scaling out the technology side to reach more people at the same time.
And so, essentially, that's where Driven came around, where it's combining all of these things that I've basically been up to over the last 20 years or so into something very simple and engaging that a lot of people can access. Essentially, that's where I'm at now.
Fleet Maull:
That's quite a story. Fabulous. That's that true value-added entrepreneurial spirit, right? There's got to be a better way to do this and a way in which we can benefit a lot more people, right. So yeah, that's just fabulous. I'm glad that your entrepreneurial spirit found its way to the world of neuroscientifically informed resilience training. That's just fabulous.
Today, day five of the Summit is focused on creating healthy agency cultures of resilience. You can look at both how to create a culture that supports resilience for the individuals and the agency and how to create a culture that is resilient itself, right? It's actually a resilient culture. I mean, it could be anywhere from one small Sheriff's Department, the MSA agency, small municipal police department to a very large police department, a very large correctional agency. So, there's really a difference in scale in first responder agencies, but regardless of the size of the agency, it really is about taking it to scale and dealing with all the vicissitudes and obstacles and challenges of those environments, with a lot of competing interests and priorities and budget issues and time and so forth. Coming up with this, a very efficient delivery method seems to make a lot of sense.
The mission of our today's focus on the Summit, creating healthy agency cultures of resilience, seems very congruent with the mission of your company, Driven. And so, I'm curious. Before we get into kind of the technology side of it, what you've discovered, what do you think some of the foundational considerations are when it comes to scaling, resilience training, and a culture of resilience within various agencies, government agencies, corporations, or in particular first responder agencies?
Jurie Rossouw:
That's an interesting question, especially because there have been a lot of these different types of programs that have tried to achieve something. There's usually some type of challenge around getting these kinds of cultures to actually take hold. One of the biggest challenges that we see is that resilience is more of an equation, almost if you're talking about a culture of resilience, because there's the individual effort in terms of investing in their own resilience, taking up these kinds of programs and building their own skills. But then there is the organizational effort on the other side that essentially needs to basically balance that equation to show that, as an organization, we are putting in the effort to create a culture that supports the resilience of the individual.
These could be in all kinds of little things like, "Can we make sure that there are enough resources available? Can we make sure that we're treating our people in a way that respects them and shows that there is an actual appreciation for what they do?" So, that's part of what we work on when we go out with agencies is we like to do that training with the leadership about really understanding and defining what resilience is going to look like for this organization, for this agency, whether it's a tiny agency with ten people, or five people or whatever, or whether it's a big organization with 75,000 people like the rural fire service here in Australia that we're now working with as well, where much more diverse type of organization with lots of volunteers that's not actually employed. So, they don't necessarily get the same kind of benefits as the employed firefighters.
All kinds of different types of challenges there that we can then bring in, because we've got the ability to use more technology and scale it out and provide more benefits more cost effectively, and still have that level of interaction with the management layers and the leadership layers so that we can help them to understand how do you create the culture that supports people, and how did we then work with individuals as well so that they see. Yeah, here are things that I can do myself. Here are the things that the organization is doing for me. There's a match and balance in terms of investment, and then gives people that idea that yeah, this is something that we can do and we can keep doing.
Fleet Maull:
Just to give our audience a sense of scale, and you did mention you're working with a rural firefighters association in Australia with 75,000. I know Driven works with all kinds of corporations and organizations, not just first responder agencies. You do have your HART program that is designed specifically for emergency responders and law enforcement, and so forth. But can you give me some of the sizes of some of the organizations you're working with, where you see that you're really getting traction of the largest organizations? You may give an example of one of the smaller type organizations you're working with and what you're seeing in terms of actually getting real scalability and real culture change, culture shift around resilience?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. It's really all types of organizations. Some of the larger organizations here in Australia, as well as some of the big financial services, organizations, where it's more just corporate workers, people in insurance. And then, to recently both start working with Georgia State University as well. There are organizations like that, where they're going to be rolling out Driven to all of their first-year students, which they've got about 57,000 students on campus there.
There is those type of organizations we're working with as well. And then, probably the role of fire service is one of the biggest ones we're starting to work with now, where 75,000 people. We're starting with smaller groups in there and then rolling it out from there. And also expanding it to the family members of people at home as well.
In terms of the results we've been seeing across all these that we published some research back in 2019, where we looked at a bunch of these organizations that we've been working with. And there, we see quite a bit of engagement over time with the program. We saw around 25% improvement in resilience over six months or so in terms of resilience that actually sticks around. So not just the quick blip in terms of, "Hey, I've just been in a workshop, and then you know, a couple of weeks later, you're back down again." So, this is more of a type of resilience that stays there. And that has more of a meaningful connection to reducing rates of depression, anxiety and increases protection against a psychological injury, like post traumatic injury, and so on.
That's one of the big things that are really important to us is to be able to take all the results that we get. Publish research around that so that we can show that, yes, this is something meaningful. And that's something that's important to me is to show that you were actually making a difference and what we're doing really works.
Fleet Maull:
Well, in terms of your basic approach, I know you've talked about something called connected resilience, and you also focus on an empowerment model. Can you talk about those two things a little bit?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. So, this is one of those interesting ideas where not all forms of resilience are necessarily equal. Sometimes we might look at someone, and they might seem resilient, but it's almost more because they've kind of given up, and they don't really care anymore. They're not really engaging with life anymore. They seem like they're very unbothered and can create this appearance of being resilient, but it's essentially a space where you might, in some way, deteriorate over time because you're not really engaging with life anymore. You're not really going out and connecting in some kind of way.
So, connected, resilience is more of that idea of you are connected with people, where you have strong support networks, you're out there, you're doing things that matter to you, and you feel like there's personal growth, you're engaging with life overall. And that term connection, as you know, all kinds of different meanings in a way it's connecting with people, but it's also creating these connections in the brain as well that create healthy patterns of behavior. How do you look after your physical health, look after your mental health? And through that, expanding it out into everyone that's around you as well. So, what's the kind of relationship and connection you have to your co-workers? How important is that? How about between you as a manager or you as staff in your, in your leadership teams? What's the connection there? What's the connection you have between your family members as well? How supportive are those relationships?
Because all those things really come together to be able to support your own resilience and your own ability to be resilient. So, that's where connected resilience, I think, is a concept we need to embrace more as something that we need to support rather than that expectation of you as the individual. You just need to be stronger to deal with more stress. Let's try and get away from that. And say, as a community, as a culture, we need to be coming together and supporting each other to be resilient.
Fleet Maull:
That's really interesting and, I think, an important idea. We do have individual resilience. It's kind of a vertical pole of resilience. It's not just what sometimes is called grit that maybe you're born with. It's actually things we can cultivate. There are things we can do to really become more individually resilient and that ultimate reservoir of our own spiritual resilience. I mean, the way we tap into some level of beingness, right.
But then, another really important part of our resilience is the social networks that were nested in, right? And our connectedness with others. In fact, often, the clinical description for spiritual resilience or fitness is a sense of connectedness within ourselves, with others, and then with some greater dimension that kids are like, meaning and purpose, right? So I think both those verticals, I mean, often in the current today's literature, there is a big focus on external systems of resilience.
I personally think both are really important. But I especially think that idea of connected resilience is important in terms of first responder communities because there has been that kind of go it alone, Lone Ranger, kind of mindset a little bit. Somebody toughened up, and it looks like they're handling things pretty well. But actually, what's going on inside may not look so good.
When we stop really investing in our social connection, that can be a real sign of empathy fatigue, burnout, or even the pathway into suicidality, especially when people start isolating and not maintaining their usual professional and social relationships. We're also good at compartmentalizing, that, you know, someone might look like they're pretty tough and resilient. But really, that's not really what's going on, right. And so, I think it's really important that we honor both of those. I love that term. I know you also want your program to be presented in a way that actually empowers people in their own resilience and creating their networks of resilience. So, could you talk about that aspect of your model?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. It's exactly why you would say no because both of those parts are important for us. That's where through the app itself and the individual and AI-powered type of coaching, there is a lot of self-directed investment in your own resilience to start to understand yourself more, start to understand where are you at, and that's where there's quick self-assessment that people can do to give them that insight in terms of where am I at across these six domains of resilience. We even have these little coasters and things to remind ourselves.
Fleet Maull:
And they've got the program in their pocket, right? There in their smartphone, right? So, talk about empowerment. They've got it right there. They can use it.
Jurie Rossouw:
Right. Exactly. And that's what's really nice about it is that it gives you that proactive training every day. And even just five minutes a day of learning a specific resilience skill gives you the chance to practice it as well. But then also, if you're not feeling great, then you can turn to it, and you can basically access the free chat where you can just talk about what's going on. Like, "I had a really hard day today. This thing happened." And you can do like a self incident debrief as well, things like that to talk about stuff that you might not yet feel comfortable talking to someone else about. You can start to structure those thoughts and get those thoughts out of your mind into the world out there if you can start to process that.
So, that kind of self-direction and individual empowerment to really understand more about yourself, more about these skills, how you can use them, and have that instant access to be able to use them anytime. That is really useful. And then also, going a step beyond that into turning people into trainers themselves so that they start to build those skills about how can I better support my colleagues? Like, I really care about mental health. My colleagues are not really into that much yet. Can I become some sort of influencer in a way to have more skills to just talk about these kinds of concepts?
It doesn't mean you become a coach or anything like that. It just means that you know a little bit more so that if you see someone struggling or you have a chat with someone, and you see them poking in a way that might have indicated vulnerability in their own minds, if they've got catastrophic thinking or those type of thought distortions, then just being able to recognize that and just have a normal conversation with it like you would with a friend. So, all those types of ways are ways in which we can empower people that I think is really powerful in the long term.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of really moving the needle in terms of any kind of cultural change of various professional social domains, right. It really comes down to implementation science. The old model that's often derisively known as trade and pray, right? We're going to do training. They may be fabulous training to get people really excited, give people great tools, and they're all excited. But within a matter of days or weeks, and certainly months, we get either caught back in our own conditioning, our own habit patterns, or the habit patterns and conditioning of the organization we're part of. Right?
The power of habit is just so strong. We all know that. And so, that really great training everybody was excited about, it just kind of disappears into the woodwork, right. And so, that model doesn't really work. There have been all kinds of things that have been experimented with in implementation science and often combining training with follow-up coaching, the whole communities of practice model.
A lot of it comes down to engagement, right? How you increase engagement. Even during training, what level of engagement do you get during your training? And then, in terms of whatever ongoing learning growth opportunities you provide or follow-up opportunities you provide or anything, even like an app, how do you increase the engagement? Right? We are also pulled in so many directions. There are so many distractions, right? There's so much information coming at us. Right? Helping people engage is challenging, right?
So, I'm curious about the approach with Driven, the approach with your app. I know you start with an assessment process. I suspect you may use some gamification and some built-in rewards, and so forth. So, what are some of your strategies and technologies for increasing engagement so that a person like myself who might sign on to your program or get the app stays engaged and actually start really reaping the benefits by sticking with it?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah, that's a good question. And is part of what set me on to this journey, as well, by creating all these programs because I used to see all these kinds of corporate programs come past where we were run a full-day workshop or something like that, and everyone really enjoys it, they have a lot of fun, they fill in their seats at the end saying, "Yeah, I love the session." and they compile all that those, those feedback forms and send it over to management.
The Management Group goes, "Yeah, people loved it. Let's do more of this training and get more people through it." But then, a week later, everyone's forgotten it. But it seems like it's good because people enjoyed it. That's not necessarily the simple aim. It's not about how much fun you had. It's about what actually happens in six months down the track, a year down the track. Do you actually have important skills now that help you to cope with whatever environment you need to face?
So, that's a big thing that set me on this path of how can we learn more about how the brain actually changes? How can we keep people engaged with these types of programs? How can we make a meaningful long-term difference in actually achieving improvement and uplift in resilience and across all these different domains of resilience as well? So, not just one small aspect, but we need to increase this holistic concept of all these different skills that people need that create that resilience capacity.
So, there is really a whole bunch of different things that come together that enable engagement in the longer term. Part of it is through the community, yes. And part of it is through the technology as well. Just on the technology side, that is where the structure of the app and the training is really through these short daily activities that we use. We check in with people and go like, "Hey, how are you doing? Let's do something really quick." And make it more fun as well and use some humor in it too. And, you know, check in with people just in terms of their mood, how are they doing so we can also be responsive that if you're not doing so well, let's do something different. Versus, if you're doing well, cool, let's do some training that might be interesting and might help you learn.
And then, as you said, using some gamification as well. So, giving people dings and things that do give you also that feeling of accomplishment. We've got this scoring system as well that helps people keep track, which is almost like a mental fitness score. It functions similarly to physical fitness. If you work out, then you get more fit. And if you stop working out, then fitness goes down. So, you need to maintain that consistent effort to maintain your physical fitness.
It's similar for the brain as well if we want to maintain our mental fitness. It's that consistent investment. So, that's more of what we want to encourage, so the people are going to keep at it basically because this is something that takes long-term commitment to really look after yourself. So, that's essentially what a lot of it is, is how do we reward people for looking after themselves so that they keep going with it.
Those are little things that we do in the app itself to help support people. Then there are things outside of that, that we can connect with as well. One of them is, and this is something that we hope to replicate in more industries. In the US, for example, we're about to have Driven accredited to provide continuing education credits to emergency medical technicians and paramedics. If they use the Driven app and they use this training for themselves to learn more about resilience, then there is a CE that they can earn as part of that. And they earn it by staying consistent with us over time. Those kinds of rewards, if we can link this into things that people actually need, which again, it says, rewarding people for looking after themselves. It should be its own reward, but if we can make it more rewarding, then fantastic, then we can help people.
Fleet Maull:
Whatever works.
Jurie Rossouw:
And then, yes. Then it's outside of that where we see. And this is really through the experience I've had with many organizations where if we can get management and the supervisors and peers and so on to be more invested in this as well, do training with them even to help them to understand the importance of leading by example. Because if you show that, "I'm the supervisor. I'm the manager. I'm super busy, but I'm making time for this."
I talk about the impact this is having on me. Like, "I was having this conversation with my kid the other day, and he was getting really upset. And then I remember this strategy here, and then I used that. It really helped us to kind of connect at that moment." And sharing those little moments about how this stuff is actually making a practical impact, it's actually useful. That type of thing tends to really inspire the staff themselves to eventually actually use it as well.
If they can see that, yes, the leaders are taking this seriously, they're really investing in this, they're using it, and then that is the practical type of thing that we saw that organizations that do that well get high engagement rate. Like even a year later, where they start with 80%, and a year later, 60% of people are still engaged in it because there's a really strong culture where they're really encouraging it. They're really interested in each other doing this type of stuff and taking it seriously. So, it takes a bit of investment. Again, it's a kind of equation that we need to balance.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, absolutely. The things you're talking about are so important. I mean, leadership is critical. Leadership, not only being willing to support that programs and not only preaching resilience but actually modeling it, really doing their own self-care work.
We hear again and again in our training when there is an ongoing training program, coming back and talking about the changes that have happened in their personal life, with their kids, like you were just mentioning, with their spouses. That really creates the buy-in. Or their sleeping for the first time in their career. They're getting off blood pressure medications, right? But really, that family stuff is so important. They're learning some basic emotional intelligence and mindfulness, and resilience skills. And suddenly, their family experiences them as being more available and actually listening. And they're having different kinds of conversations with the kids and their spouses. It's transformative. And then, you really get to buy-in. And especially if you have leaders who have that experience and they become real champions.
Jurie Rossouw:
So, yeah. That's huge.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to talk about your HART program and more about the Driven approach, but I'd like to back up for a minute. Maybe we should have even started here because you've done a lot of research, a lot of neuroscience study, and been studying resilience for a long time.
I'd like to ask you a little bit about just kind of what is resilience? I asked this question of a number of scientists in a global resilience summit we had for the general public last spring and got little different answers. I tried to pin people down a little bit, but can we look on an MRI and tell the difference between a resilient brain and a non-resilient brain? I got different answers about that.
Sometimes we talk about resilience, as you can see it in response, the way people were actually able to respond, right? And, you know, the old metaphors for resilience were elasticity being able to bounce back, spring back. Today, people are sometimes saying no. We want to think of it in terms of being able to bounce forward or spring forward because sometimes it's going back to what was isn't that great, right? And that kind of ties into the whole idea of post traumatic growth and things like that.
The common sense metaphor that we might all have is, "My tank feels pretty full." "I'm running on fumes here." And then, we don't feel resilient, and we're really running towards burnout. Is resilience something that we can kind of build, we have a reservoir of? I mean, what is your understanding of resilience? Maybe both in common sense terms but also what you've learned from neuroscience.
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. Essentially, if I define resilience, the way I look at it is three words, really, which is advancing despite adversity. That means, from an advancing perspective, if you're always moving towards something that's meaningful to you and you've got a sense of purpose in life, despite essentially encompasses that idea that nothing really holds us back. And we don't even necessarily need to wait for adversity before we develop these things. We can also be proactive about this. We can prepare for things.
And then, adversity is really the big thing in life, the big challenges, but it's also the small daily challenges, like, I can't get my favorite coffee because my coffee shop is closed because of lockdown. It's got its own little bit of adversity there that we need to have a response to. That idea is that we're always moving forward in life, and there's going to be ups and downs, and all of that, but we have a sense of meaning. We have a sense of purpose that we can constantly advance towards to actually make that happen.
That's where we see the six domains of resilience, where vision is one of them, which is that meaning of purpose. Then composure, which is more about emotion and stress management. Reasoning is more around preparation, planning, introspection. There's health, which is more of the physical aspects of looking after yourself physically, nutrition, sleep, exercise, tenacity, which is more around persistence, maintaining motivation. And then collaboration, which is really that connection with others having strong relationships.
Fleet Maull:
Is that the little diagram you just showed me? Are those the six areas on there?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. Hold on. I got a stress ball here. There are little things like that. We can give people as well just to essentially get going to get resilience out of the head and into your mind. It reminds you to think about these things. The brain is, of course, the most complex thing that we're aware of. It helps us simplify that into something that's a bit more understandable. And we can almost look at it more from the perspective of limbic brain activation, that, you know, fear response, fight or flight, all that. And frontal cortex activation, which is more of that strategic thinking and feeling safe and engaged.
A lot of these resilience skills that we build create connections between different parts of the brain to be able to regulate the activation of the limbic brain more so that essentially the limbic brain becomes less reactive. It becomes less able to interrupt your thinking, and thereby, you can, in more situations, feel confident and feel that, yes, I can think clearly. I can use all the resources available in my brain to deal with the situation that I'm facing and think more constructively about that.
That's where I think in a similar way, that if you were to put someone in an MRI, and you want to or if you want to do diffusion studies or whatever, then you would need to run scenarios through them and basically say, "Okay, you're facing this scenario now." And then through that, I would suspect you'd be able to see less reactivity in many of the limbic brain areas and more frontal cortex and generally association cortex activation than you would in other people. So, that's the kind of study I would love to run sometime.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, I find all that quite fascinating. We do know neuroscientifically that basic mindfulness training, resilience training over time will actually shrink the size of the amygdala, those warning bells in the limbic system that are the reactivity that triggers that fear-based response. It actually increases the grey matter density of neural pathways that support a positive outlook, emotion regulation, cognitive control, and so forth, that the brain actually does change based on the phenomenon known as neuroplasticity over time with this kind of training.
I liked the idea you're talking about relating it to adversity and how we can respond to adversity and move forward and grow. I also wonder if you connect with the idea of thriving. My friend and colleague Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin Centre for Healthy Minds has done a lot of neuroscientific research on well-being. And really, they understand the neuronal substrates are what we call psychological well-being, both dynamic well-being, and subjective well-being, and that we can now think well-being is something we actually train up and we know how to train ourselves to have greater well-being.
And also, now his work is focusing a lot on thriving but really any thriving in the face of adversity. I also think of Kelly McGonigal's work around stress. We're beginning to realize stress is not the enemy. We all need the stress. I mean, what do we call putting stress on our muscles and bones? We call that exercise, right? If we don't challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, we don't grow, right. And so, a lot of the challenges that first responders face that can lead to very significant health risks could also be the basis for thriving and evolving to another level of human performance and driving if we have the skills to do that in a resilient way. Does that make sense from what you're talking about?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's that relationship that we have with stress that changes quite a bit as we become more resilient. That's that human function curve that we tend to see as well, and it was our personal efficacy and performance on the one axis and performance on the other, where there's pressure on the other. And at very low levels of pressure, then we might feel kind of bored, but as pressure and stress increase, then our performance tends to increase as well because we feel like, "Yeah. Okay, we need to do things, and there was something important that we need to work on here."
There's that peak performance zone there where your personal efficacy and the level of stress kind of come together. And you almost get that feeling of flow where you state, "Yeah, I'm getting things done. And other stuff is important. I need to work on it. I'm kicking goals." And you just have a great feeling there. But then, if pressure increases beyond that, that's when our performance starts to go down, and we start to feel that, "Okay. Now, there's too much. I'm falling behind." And you start stressing so much about the things you need to get done, but you don't actually do them. And then you get even more stressed, and you get this whole challenging space.
That's where we often find ourselves in. But then, as we build resilience, we start to expand that zone of our peak performance because we can now think about stress in more healthy ways. We have strategies as well that if we find ourselves in this overload space, then we can more easily recognize what's happening and bring ourselves back to the point where we feel more positive about things, even if it's saying no to things in the signal.
We can't do that. I've got these other things. And you put yourself in this mindset, more effectively, where you feel that yes, okay, this is good. This is where I'm enjoying myself. This is where I feel personally challenged. Essentially, as humans enjoy that feeling that I'm being challenged, and I'm meeting that challenge, and so thereby I feel like I'm growing, I feel like I'm advancing, and I'm doing the things that are important to me.
So, it's that type of relationship where we can start to think about stress in a more healthy way as well that it also starts to change our response because, again, it comes back to the brain. If we think about it in a healthy way, then there's less limbic brain activation, there's less cortisol, there's less stress in the body, less detrimental effects to the rest of our body, and our minds feel more engaged with what we're doing and the situation that we need to work through
Fleet Maull:
Absolutely. It's the incredible power of the mind and mindset and things like cognitive reframing, where we can see something as an impressive thing and get up. "Okay, there's a challenge. Cool, I'm ready. Let's go." Right? There are so many good things you talked about there. I mean, I love that notion of flow.
One area of research in my own personal growth and study. I'm really fascinated by kind of joining the flow state with more awareness and more consciousness because we sometimes stumble into the flow state. I think we can end up in a flow state because of an emergency. Some people end up in a flow state in the middle of a car accident, right? I think first responders may click into a flow state because they've trained train, train train, and then in a crisis, something kicks in. And for a while, they're just in this state doing what they need to do, right.
And also athletes and performers. They train, train, train train. They can access this flow state. And then sometimes they talk about it's almost as if somebody else was doing it, right. But can we bring more awareness into that consciousness? So great, both greater access to it. And so, it's not like we get on the other side of the flow. What happens? We actually feel like we were there during the flow, right?
It's like marrying a couple of models there because you talked about this kind of peak performance zone. Dan Siegel coined the term the window of tolerance. I and others sometimes like to call it the zone of resilience. That's where we can be in that responsive relational mode to the challenges of life rather than getting triggered down in the shutting down into hyperarousal, starting to shut down, or we get triggered into hyperarousal, right. And then, we get outside of our zone of effectiveness, right? But that's kind of our normal response to relational, our best self-functioning, right. But then, when you talk about peak performance, that's kind of a different zone, right? It's similar, and we're going to still be resilient and responsive, constant relational at our best, but now even at a higher level of challenge, maybe a higher level of stress.
I think that's really just fascinating and gives a window because a lot of first responders are really into performance or high-performance people. A lot are really into fitness, really in various forms of athletics. Right? So, I think this science of performance is really important and could be one way to attract the first responder community integrated to resilience in a way. I mean, in some places in the fitness world, they get into fitness in ways that are actually not healthy in the long run. Right? But if we can get into this idea, how do you marry wellness, resilience, and performance? Right? And really have a greater scientific understanding of that And then, you know, get in a sense, "Okay. I'm feeling like I'm growing along those dimensions?"
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. No, exactly. That type of idea of a lot about resilience is the investment we make ahead of time that gives us the skills that at the moment when we need it, we are actually really prepared. Our mind is really focused on the task. We feel like, yes, we've got the training, we've got the mindset, we've got everything to deal with this.
And then, also having that sense of confidence that even if it ends up being a really challenging situation, even if there are things that end up being really difficult through that, afterward, I've got more of the mental capacity as well to be able to deal with that and to start processing that rather than try and bottle things up and try to ignore it.
We've got more of the mental skills to be able to work through it and in a much more healthy way and sustainable way. I think that word sustainable is one of the big things about resilience as well is that we want to be able to perform really well and have a really high level so that we have that peak performance. But we want to be able to do that over the long term, like year after year.
So, it's not a case of you come in as a firefighter, and for a couple of years, you're a star, and you're a hero and all that. And then, you just kind of burn out because you just cannot sustain that pace in the long term. I think that's often where the veterans and all that have a lot more to say about, "Okay, if you want to be able to stick around in this, then here are some things to keep in mind." So, more of those strategies, we can teach people early on so that they can sustain that type of performance. They can have a long career that's really meaningful and really enriching over the long term. That I think is really important.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, absolutely. Along with performing, building in those rest and recovery loops is critical. I mean, I would say the big ones at night or whenever we sleep to having a good night's sleep is critical. But even moment to moment, through breath regulation and just that one conscious breath, pause. Right? You're just constantly building in those recovery loops because we can't just live in a state of that kind of activation. We have to build in the rest and recovery.
So, continue with the science a bit. You have this predictive six-factor model or PR-6 model that has to do with your assessment and evaluation as people go through using your model to become more resilient. Could you talk about that?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. So, the idea of the PR-6, the predictive six-factor resilience model, is that we're looking both at where the individual is right now. So, giving people that insight across all the six domains. This is where I'm at. These are my strengths. These are areas where there may be some room for improvement, but also then looking at what are the types of behaviors you're starting to show now that indicates potentially where you're heading in the future? Are you starting to disengage from the world? Or are you really still engaging with the world to give that sense that this is where you're at, this is maybe where you might be heading too so that you can have that mindfulness in terms of what's your mind like at the moment and your current trajectory so that you can use that to inform what are you going to be doing next. And that's where the training then comes in, which is essentially prioritized based on the scoring itself.
What's interesting there and we saw that with our research as well is that people who tend to find that they have more areas to work on, that tend to be an inspiration for them to then actually work on those things and they then they actually use the program more and get more out of it to just start to take ownership of their own training. I think it makes sense because pretty much all of us think like yeah, sure. I'm resilient. Because if you ask someone, Are you resilient? Like, yeah, sure. It's such a nebulous concept. Like, what is it really? I don't really understand. But then, once they do the assessment, then they see, "Oh, okay. This is what it really is. And it's all these different things. And yeah, I'm good here. But over here, I'm not doing that great. And yeah, that makes sense. So, maybe I should learn more of that."
What is it exactly? What are the strategies that I can use? So, it's that type of inspiration that I think is so important and so valuable in terms of this understanding. And doing that benchmark. Because that's essentially what it is. You're kind of benchmarking where am I at compared to everyone else? People always tend to be interested in that type of thing or just having that sense of comparing in a way. And of course, comparing is also the thief of joy, as they tend to say.
So, there's the other side of that. But having that insight into what is healthy, what's a level that it could be protective for you, and comparing to that type of thing is useful, just to inspire more ownership to say that, "Okay, yeah. I could be better at this. Let me do some work on that." As you do that, then you get the benefits of building your confidence and building better relationships with other people and feeling that, "Yeah, actually, I've done this work in myself. I've got more pride in myself now in where I'm at and what I can accomplish."
So, that's essentially what the PR-6 model is. It's getting people to get that insight and have that ownership into themselves, build their skills over time, and then be able to reassess over time so we can see what do we do? What did we accomplish? Where do we still maybe have some work to do so it's useful as well for like an organizational litmus test in overtime to be able to see, "Okay, where did we start? Where are we at now? How can we keep building on this over time?"
Fleet Maull:
So, yeah. If you have an agency that uses the Driven app for their agency, I don't know if you white label it or not or what, but let's say the agency is really offering this app to all their employees. Can they look at collective data on the back end and kind of see whether they're moving the needle collectively, as well as the individual results?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah, so the individual results is always confidential, so that you as a participant can always feel safe and that you can be totally honest because you're the only one that gets to know about yourself. But then, for the agency level, then we can look at teams more broadly and across the agency so that you can see what's happening. Are we moving the needle?
Fleet Maull:
Right. So, it's the aggregate data. You don't have the names, but you see the averages. The aggregate data, yeah.
Jurie Rossouw:
Identified and aggregated. In that way, we can split it by teams as well so that individual managers and leaders can see it. "So, this team is doing great. Let's learn from them. What are they doing that's making the team so awesome?" Is this team not struggling a little bit? What's happening there? Let's see how we can invest more in helping them to improve. So, it's a really useful insight to get?
Fleet Maull:
Well, let's talk a little bit about the HART program that you developed specifically for emergency responders and law enforcement.
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. So, HART (high adversity resilience training). That is really where we take these ideas of the PR-6 domains, and we'll look more at the specialist skills that really apply to people in emergency response. So, what we essentially put together there are a whole bunch of evidence-based strategies that people can use for the bigger challenges that they would face that the general public wouldn't face. So essentially, the type of training that we do with HART is quite a bit different from what we do with the more corporate office worker type of resilience training.
Here, we get deeper into different types of strategies, like how do you prepare more for the type of things that you would see if you come across a crash site. There are things you're gonna see there that believe in mental traces that we need to be able to process effectively. What are some strategies there? How do we do compartmentalization even? It is a useful strategy if you do it in a sustainable way. So, how do we turn it into sustainable compartments so that we can use it at the moment when we need to, but we are always prepared to unpack that? We're always ready to kind of open those boxes at the right times and start to process the things that even goes into the boxes in the first place.
There are all these kind of different strategies that we use that is much more relevant and also be a bit more interesting because they're more relevant essentially for the different types of occupations. The way the training works as well through the app is, you can say, I'm a police officer, or a firefighter, or a whole number of other occupations. And then, the training is also tailored to that occupation. So, you get your specific examples, specifically for you in your type of occupation. So then we extend it further out into more of the culture of resilience side where there's training for the leaders, there's training for the managers.
How do you create a culture and an environment that supports resilience but then also take it out into the family members of the staff themselves? That's where we can start to build resilience skills in the partners and even in the kids at home so that they can understand how I can build my own resilience to support my husband, or my wife, or my parents? What are the strategies that they're using as well? Because if I, as a family member, can understand the coping strategies that the emergency worker is using, then it gives me more context. It gives me more understanding to be able to support more effectively. It just increases communication. It increases understanding. It increases connectedness, which then is where we come back to that idea of connected resilience, where you're not just connected to each other with your colleagues but also to management and family at home.
And you get this really amazing culture of people around you, where everyone really supports each other and has the same language that they can share. And that's where a heart essentially really comes together as a really holistic type of program that uses everything from technology to relationships to really support people and enhance their individual resilience.
Fleet Maull:
That's really great because I think first responders are looking for training and resources designed specifically for the challenge they deal with every day. And then, even have it specifically focused on through your AI-driven app, you're going to find different resources in very discipline-specific whether you're a police officer, or fire rescue, or EMFs, and so forth. So, wow. That seems to be an ideal application of technology. So, how do people find out about Driven, whether it's at the agency level is? Is there a free Driven app online that people can access through their app store? Or is this something that's available mostly at the organizational level?
Jurie Rossouw:
Currently, it's mostly at the organizational and agency level. Anyone can really contact us at HelloDriven.com if they want to check it out and try it out. We can actually give you a code as well that you can make available. And people can just try it out if they want to check out what it is, how does it work, or otherwise get in touch with us directly.
There is FirstWatch as well, which is an organization that we work with within the United States that we're partnered with as well. Also uses Driven with a whole lot of agencies already in America as a way to start and build resilience. So, pull out ways to try to access it and try it out. Mostly, I'd love to talk to people and just get it out to more agencies because I think there's so much work that needs to be done out there. And if we can help people do this in a more cost-effective way that we can actually reach people and make a meaningful difference, that's what really matters at the end of the day.
Fleet Maull:
Let's say an agency already has a resilience program, maybe an internally resourced program they developed, or maybe even have another provider that's providing some kind of resilience training program. Will the app be something that could be an adjunct to that that would provide effective assessment and help them really get a better sense, maybe get more traction with their program, but also get a better sense of the results?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yeah. No, it's interesting because that's some of the work that we do quite a bit already is that for some agencies, we are mainly just doing the assessment component to then start to understand what's the impact of other programs that they are running. So, just in that kind of way, that's something we can help with as well.
We've done a whole bunch of different types of assessments and even helped some agencies develop unique assessments for the specific type of applications that they're running. So, there's a whole lot of different types of work that we can help with there. We've helped to develop some specialized training as well for some large social media organizations with the crisis management staff that they have there.
So, all those different types of ways in which there might be some kind of need around improving individual capacity or measuring individual capacity, that's always a space where we can come in. And we've got a lot of scientific experience there and analytics and data and statistical analysis. That's part of where I go into flow, which is weird.
Fleet Maull:
Hey, that's your nerd flow? Right?
Jurie Rossouw:
That's something I realized more later in my life. It's interesting, but I guess we just kind of enjoy numbers and things now.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, interesting. Well, this data-driven approach is so important at the agency level, so we know what we're doing. We know what we're spending money on. We can evaluate it. But even at the individual level, it's so amazing all the new technology, the wearables, that we can get so much data.
I mean, I use a smart scale, and I have a smartwatch, and by getting this data as we engage in resilience and fitness training of any kind, we're really developing sort of neuro biofeedback loops because we do an activity. I mean, even at some point, everybody knows you workout, and you get on a scale. Do you see a difference? And maybe people have done simple biofeedback where you're hooked up to a heart monitor. You get a digital or analog representation of your heartbeat. And with your mind, you can learn to raise and lower your heartbeat. I mean, it's easy to learn.
The more data I'm getting about the results of my efforts, it's just going to increase my own confidence in what I'm doing. I'm also going to be able to get more refined and more nuanced about how I'm investing my time and energy in my fitness and resilience training because we're all busy, right? Today, we already talked about hacking, right? Everybody wants the latest hack, right?
If I can get as resilient with 30 hours of work that I could with two hours of work and then do it the other way, which one am I going to choose? Well, sure, I'm going to choose the 30-minute approach, right? But the way we're going to figure that out is by having the data really and getting in that, right. So, I think it's both at the individual level and the agency level. This approach you're taking with Driven just makes so much sense.
Jurie Rossouw:
That is so true. Just trying to help people understand and, even from a plasticity perspective, just what the value is, of just putting that little bit of effort in every day and building those connections. And then, if we can start to make that more tangible and more visible for people, then that is so important to just inspire that consistency of effort over time.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah. Really inspiring the work you're doing. I always come back to one of the more famous performance coaches and experts, Tony Robbins, worldwide renowned. He talks about what really are the components of lasting happiness and satisfaction as a human being.
He says it's really two things. It's a deeply felt experience that we're growing and evolving and which you've been talking about. And then, it's a deeply felt experience that we're contributing. First responders are really positioned to express.
Now, unfortunately, without good coping skills, it can push people into a cycle where they start to feel like they're not growing. And even that sense of contribution can wane, right? But with these skills, I mean, who's better positioned to feel like they're growing, evolving, and making a huge contribution to life than our heroic first responders?
I think with the kind of support organizations like yours and approaches like Driven, this can really be a huge boost to the first responder community. So, thank you so much for the work you're doing.
Jurie Rossouw:
Fantastic. It's my pleasure. As long as we're making a difference and we keep learning as well ourselves, I think there's so much work to be done here. So, it's great to see all these different people with only different types of work that they're doing. This is all about making individual sustainability differences over time, which really matters.
Fleet Maull:
That's great. And it's HelloDriven.com?
Jurie Rossouw:
Yes, HelloDriven.com.
Fleet Maull:
HelloDriven.com. So, Jurie Rossouw, the CEO, founder of HelloDriven.com. Great to be with you today. And thank you so much for the work you're doing in supporting first responders.
Jurie Rossouw:
Fantastic. Thank you for having me.