Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have HER Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. HER Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside HER Collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone.

Erica: Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, to be ambitious but not too ambitious.

Erica: Does that sound familiar? We are over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear and give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you are in the right place. Today's guest is Dr. Heather Collins, a cognitive neuroscientist on a mission to make brain science practical, powerful, and accessible for all of us. Dr. Heather earned her PhD in psychological and brain sciences, and she spent her career studying how we learn, think, and remember, not just in the lab, but in the real world. She's been published in top tier journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, collaborated on research with NASA astronauts y'all, and delivered not one, not two, but three TEDx talks that bring neuroscience to life in bold and energizing ways. Now whether you are looking to improve memory, boost confidence, or build a smarter, more effective team, Dr. Heather Collins believes your brain is your most important resource. And today, she is going to unlock it for us.

Erica: So Dr. Heather Collins, welcome to the show. And I have no idea why I have to say your name that way, but it's the only way it can come out of my mouth.

Dr. Heather Collins: We'll take it. Thank you, Erica. I'm blessed to be here. I love it. I'm so impressed. I'm so excited.

Erica: I am so excited. So we've gotta dive right on in. Okay? Neuroscientist and keynote speaker, how does all this come together?

Dr. Heather Collins: It is not a common combination. It all started with me growing up loving performing. I grew up as a dancer, tap, jazz, ballet, Hawaiian, Tahitian, was in a modern company in college for two years. I also grew up as a speaker doing public speech and debate when I was in high school competitively and going on from there. And as I was working on my PhD, I realized that I was kind of an odd duck because I actually really enjoyed sharing and speaking about the research that was going on and that I was doing with not just students, not just other academics, but really with anybody who would listen, with my grandmother, with family friends, with high school students for outreach programs.

Dr. Heather Collins: And so it became a passion of mine to engage in more and more of that dissemination of science in a way that could affect people where they are. Do you pay her taxes, Erica?

Erica: I believe so.

Dr. Heather Collins: Okay. Okay. Oh, we're on the record. She pays her taxes. Well, I do too. At least I think I did. Yes, I did. And anyone who pays their taxes funds research. And it was frustrating to me that a lot of that research is written by scientists for other scientists. And really, taxpayers don't necessarily see a lot of ROI on that. And so I'm bringing that ROI to taxpayers, to the public, to everybody who pays for this research. We all have brains. I think we all value our brains. And if we sit and think about it, we all really want to know how to get the most out of our brains. And the research can help us understand how to do that.

Erica: Optimizing brainpower. I love all that. And I think it's so interesting because it feels like neuroscience is having its moment right now in the spotlight. And I'm just curious, why do you think that is?

Dr. Heather Collins: I don't know. It's interesting to me that there's definitely this perception of that, and you're certainly not the first person who's told me about that. But I eat, sleep, breathe, and live this. So for me, this is just another day. I think part of it is that there's an increase in technology associated with neuroscience. MRI scanners are very common now, and really they weren't that common fifteen years ago, and were certainly a lot more expensive. So with the increase in availability of MRIs, which is the primary way we study human brains, that's helped. They tend to frown upon us cutting open a live person's skull and seeing what happens, so that's why we use MRI. And I think people really do, in this day and age of everything being accessible to us, yearn to know more about what they can do to grow their brain capacity and help their brain move them where they want to go and achieve their goals.

Erica: I love that. And that leads me right into this next question, which is all about there are ambitious women who listen to this podcast, but most of those women either are feeling stuck or at one point in their life, they have felt stuck. What is going on inside of her brain when she feels like she has just hit that wall?

Dr. Heather Collins: Oh, that's such a powerful question. It really is because, as you said, at one point in time or another, at least once, probably several times, we've all felt stuck. And when we feel stuck, we feel like something is wrong with us. And I'm here to tell you it's not. If you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling like you're having a really challenging time moving forward, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your brain. In fact, this is actually your brain doing its job, because your brain's primary job is to protect you. Think about back in the cave people days. Our brains were really leery about going outside of that cave maybe at certain times of day, like dusk, when there might be some predator out there ready to attack us. And that fear mechanism really holds over to today. So feeling like we can't move forward is really just our brain saying change can be scary, and we're not sure about that, and it's safer just to stay where we are. And unfortunately, that's not necessarily what's in our best interest or what we want for ourselves. So it's your brain protecting itself. It's your brain protecting you, and it's your brain attempting to be efficient and to optimize what it's doing. Now the key is in getting unstuck, because just as your brain's doing its job to protect itself, you can also shift your brain to actually help you engage in that change and become unstuck and really move forward. So there's that fear response, and that's protecting ourselves, and that's in your amygdala. It's a little tiny area of the brain deep in the center of your brain, but it's responsible for emotional processing and fear. And for a tiny little area of your brain, boy, that fear response is big. Because when you're afraid, what does it feel like? Can you do anything?

Erica: No, I just want to crawl in a hole and contemplate my demise.

Dr. Heather Collins: Exactly. We all do. And the really interesting thing is that when we're engaged in fear, when we're engaged in this deeply innate emotional process that protects ourselves, that actually hijacks your prefrontal cortex, responsible for thinking, decision making, reasoning, problem solving, goal setting, and actually moving forward. So that fear cycle prevents us from actually using our prefrontal cortex to do what we want to do. So the key is to shift, and that is we want to make small shifts to shut down that fear process and engage in our prefrontal cortex and higher order cognitive processing. That can be as simple as asking a different question. It can be as simple as removing yourself from the situation, getting up, going for a walk, calling a friend, calling a family member, playing with a pet for a few minutes, switching tasks and focusing on something else. But the minute you make that shift, however small and subtle it is, you're really working toward escaping that fear loop and moving into that goal forward motion path.

Erica: Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in a place, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of. But guess what? It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities.

Erica: My book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than the great Mel Robbins, best selling author and motivational powerhouse. It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work. Inside, you'll find real life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book. It's your roadmap to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you because no one deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Erica: Okay, so I always envision that every time you step outside of your comfort zone, it gets a little bit bigger. Right? So you can do harder and harder things, and I think that's what you're saying with taking these incremental shifts.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yes, incremental shifts. And it's really important too that fear can become a cycle. And your brain moves fast, your neurons fire at a fraction of a second. So just making the small shifts is enough to change your brain's thought patterns and eliminate that fear pattern. And as you said, incremental change is exactly where it's at. So once you start small, then you can grow it bigger and bigger and bigger.

Erica: Okay, I gotta tell you this story. It's slightly embarrassing, but this whole thing is mind boggling to me, and I'm really embracing it as I'm learning more and more about myself. I turned 40 this year, and I said, I'm gonna do 40 hard things because I'm 40. Some of these things were big things, like run another half marathon. I had quit my job, so it was taking a lot of steps in my newfound entrepreneurship, all of those things. But then one of the very first hard things that made me go, this isn't normally a hard thing for most people, was I had to have a garage door repairman come over and reset my garage. You know those little clickers in your car, they fit on your belt like a beeper, but then there's also the ones in the rear view mirror that you press if you have a fancy car. I've got one of those where you can program it, and it's supposed to just open it up. I've never been able to program the dang thing. So I have this professional garage door repairman coming over, I'm sure he knows exactly how to fix this problem. Do I want to ask him? Absolutely not, because I wouldn't want to inconvenience him. What if he's going to think I don't know how to do this? I had all these fears, and I was like, okay, this is a hard thing. So I went forward and asked him to do it, and sure enough, it took him one minute and he was done. I'm plotting and thinking through my life, and I'm recognizing that that one small question, asking for something, was a hard thing for me, so I make a note of it. I'm getting up and speaking to 700 people on stage, I launched an online digital platform, all these other things that most people would be like, oh my god, those are so hard, I wouldn't put those on my list. I was like, no, that wasn't that hard. Then the other day, I'm sitting in Maine, up at the bar, reading a book, and I had a great idea for a post about whether you're comfortable sitting at the bar alone eating dinner. And I thought it'd be really great if I had a picture of me sitting at the bar reading my book alone, but that would require me to ask someone to take a picture of myself sitting at the bar alone. And did I want to do that? I wrestled with that for fifteen minutes before I was like, Erica, this is one of those hard things, and now that you know it, you have to do it. And then I asked my waitress, did she have a problem with it? Absolutely not, she took it within two seconds and the moment was over. But what is wrong with me?

Dr. Heather Collins: Nothing is wrong with you. And actually, there are a few really important things about what you said. One is that there are individual differences in what we consider difficult or not. Erica, you are a seasoned professional, you have been a corporate executive, you have trained your brain that all of these really, really difficult professional tasks are piece of cake, no big deal. And that's because of your experience. What you have not trained yourself to do is ask for help, it sounds like. Is that correct?

Erica: That may be slightly accurate.

Dr. Heather Collins: Right. So how were you able to get from wherever you started to this amazing apex of professional awesomeness? You did it through practice, and you did it through small achievements leading to bigger achievements. So the same thing happens with other areas of your life. We all have different areas of our life that we are not experienced with. My thing, and I really dread this more than anything, is mailing packages at the post office. Getting everything packaged up and getting the label on it, I just dread it.

Erica: Well, it is an inconvenience.

Dr. Heather Collins: Oh, it is an inconvenience. And my post office is open for like three hours a day with a two and a half hour lunch break in between. So it is inconvenient, but that's my dread. And when we have something that we fear or that's uncomfortable or feels icky, we tend to engage in avoidance, and that actually just builds up the fear more and more in your brain and makes it worse. So the key is, for these things that we want to tackle that are new and different and uncomfortable, you just have to dive in and start somewhere. Your brain is really good at creating habits, and those habits can be good or bad, but they are habits. So what we want to do is start with very small incremental steps, like asking the garage door repairman for help and asking the waitress to take a picture of you. We want to start with steps that probably cognitively are small, and you can acknowledge that they're small, but emotionally there's a lot of fear associated with them. That's why you were really hard on yourself. Don't be hard on yourself, it doesn't help anything at all, it just stresses you out, and stress is bad for memory, cognition, and everything. So don't do that. And it's why we can hold two things in our mind at once, that our prefrontal cortex involved in reasoning and thinking says, this is ridiculous, I should be able to do this, and our emotional center, our limbic system with that amygdala, is saying, oh, I'm so afraid, this feels really icky, and I'm really uncomfortable with this.

Erica: Well, what I love about it, and I'm gonna say everybody should do like 40 hard things a year, because it forces me to, number one, identify them and recognize them. And I think in a normal situation where I didn't give myself this challenge to document where my struggles were, I would have just skipped over the awareness of it. I would have pushed through, I would have ignored it, and I would not have seen this pattern that I'm now seeing. Not asking for help. But now that I know it, I can't unring that bell, and so now I can actually do the work to figure out why is it that you struggle with this, how can you lean into that more, and then start making those habit changes so I can actually start asking for help, and allow people to help me.

Dr. Heather Collins: Absolutely, yeah. And what you said about awareness, I think, is really crucial. And I think for high achieving women, we especially tend to feel stuck. We're kind of used to this constant advancement, and when there's a small plateau, that's when we feel stuck. And part of what makes us feel stuck is not being aware of what's happening, that we've automated so many things in our daily life, and it feels good for a while, it feels stable, it feels comfortable, and then for high achieving women, that comfort becomes discomfort. So that awareness is such an important point. In research, we call that metacognitive awareness, where you're simply aware of your own thinking. And a great way for high achieving women to become unstuck is to do exactly what you did, to stop and think about what are the areas of my life that I've automated that have become habit, and where do I want those to be versus where are they now. And even if you take ten minutes a day and stop and just think about that, that will actually help you become unstuck. And this is antithetical to a lot of high achieving professional women, because you're like, oh, ten minutes a day, where am I going to get that? Well, ten minutes a day can help you become unstuck, or you can blow through that ten minutes with busy task work and continue the path you're on, which is a plateau. So it's really an investment in yourself. And I don't know how long it took you to come up with those 40 items, 40 is a lot, but certainly ten minutes, you could come up with a few things.

Erica: Well, I don't know what all of them are yet, they have to come to me as I go through life. I didn't know I was going to be faced with this decision to ask the garage door repairman, it just showed up.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, and when it showed up, you identified it.

Erica: I did. I acted.

Dr. Heather Collins: You acted. So when you make notes of things that are difficult for you, things that might be keeping you stuck, things that have been automated, then you can interrupt those. When things are automated, your brain fires off really rapidly. So if you don't take the time to actually make a list and really deeply think about what you're automating, then you can't interrupt that automation. So the key is being able to make a list, engage in that metacognitive awareness. Where are my thoughts, what am I thinking, what's happening that's making me automate all of this, and what do I want to do instead? And that way, when that thing comes up, you know to stop and shift and start asking other questions to move yourself out of that. That's exactly what you did when that garage door repairman showed up. You thought to yourself, this is really challenging for me, but I know it's challenging for me, I've already identified this challenge in myself, and now I can stop and ask a question. And when you're asking questions, you're engaging in curiosity. And curiosity helps your brain learn, it helps your brain grow. Learning actually physiologically changes your brain, it makes those neural pathways grow thicker and more robust, and can shift them from feeling like you're thinking with a two lane road to a four lane freeway. So these are things that are good for your brain, and good for your professional life too. This is how you're going to get unstuck and advance and move past those plateaus and continue achieving.

Erica: I love that. And when you're talking about learning, that can come in any way, shape, or form. It could be listening to a podcast that challenges you, reading a book, reading a magazine, just doing something. We're learning right now, Erica. I'm talking to our neuroscientist.

Dr. Heather Collins: I know you're learning from me. This is a learning experience. Everything is a learning experience, or everything can be a learning experience. And often all you need to do in order to shift it into a learning experience is engage in curiosity and ask questions. And that's because curiosity, one of the key regions involved is your anterior cingulate cortex. It's a little bit like a gateway where it determines is something going to go along this path in the brain, or is it going to go along that path. And when you engage in curiosity, it says, oh wow, I need to shift this to that prefrontal cortex so that we can really think about how things are going and make decisions and engage in some problem solving. And just like any neurobiological habit for your brain, curiosity can become a really good habit where you don't have to think about doing it, you just do it.

Erica: Well, honestly, that's what I coach on a lot with women, especially inside HER Collective. We always talk about approaching it with a curious mindset, asking people why did you say it that way, what was your intent with that, where do you want to go with this. And when you lead with that rather than assumptions, you get so much further. So not only is it good for your brain, it's also good for your career.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, funny thing, right, learning is good for your career. Learning about your people, your organization, your goals, learning about everything. We love learning.

Erica: I want to talk about the expert brain, because you talk about building an expert brain, one that works smarter, not harder. And girl, that's what I'm here for. So how do we stop glorifying this busyness that we're all after and really start tapping into more of that expert level thinking?

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, so there's a really interesting dichotomy that happens, which is when we're busy, it's sort of like you're on a hamster wheel and you're just pedaling along.

Erica: Stuff done, but I don't know what it is.

Dr. Heather Collins: Right. And a lot of the stuff you're getting done is like little checklist-y kinds of things. So here's the dichotomy, when you get something done and you can check it off your list, you get a little bit of a dopamine squirt in your brain, and we all like a good dopamine squirt. It's a neurotransmitter that makes us feel good, makes us feel accomplished, makes us feel like we've done something. But chances are, you might get a little dopamine squirt for ticking off those 20 little things off your busyness to-do list, but at the end of the day, you're still going to feel like something was lacking, like the big picture isn't getting done. And part of that is because we have to stop chasing that hamster wheel, we have to stop prioritizing being busy. Your brain is going to tackle what you give it. If you give it busy work, it's going to tackle that. But what you're talking about is not busy work, it's the big picture work. And in order for your brain to tackle big picture work and really become an expert thinker, an expert at whatever you do, you need that ten minutes a day, just as we talked about earlier, to stop and write down your challenges. You really need ten minutes a day where you're not doing busy work. So if busy work is the habit and that's the hamster wheel your brain is running on, you have to stop it. And if you don't stop it, you can't change the mode of thinking that your brain is in. So stop it ten minutes a day, that's literally all it will take to start seeing things shift. And during that ten minutes, you think about the big picture, you write down your big goals, you divide them into sub goals, and those sub goals have to be actionable, realistic, and achievable. I might want world peace, but we're going to say that's probably not a good goal to have, it's not achievable. You want it to be measurable. And when your brain engages in this kind of deep thinking, it's going to propel you toward this goal directed behavior. And by having sub goals, you get rid of your busyness checklist and just have a sub goal checklist. Maybe that means instead of ticking 20 little things off a day, you're ticking one bigger thing off a day, but you know that that one bigger thing is what in fact is moving you forward.

Erica: I'm so fascinated by this, and the one thing that keeps popping up in my head is I feel so many women already saying, I just struggle with the guilt of ten minutes, and not doing something like folding the laundry or something else, because there's always something to be done. And I guess my question is, what would you say to that?

Dr. Heather Collins: I would say that's the feeling of chasing the hamster wheel, it feels good because we're doing something. And doing nothing feels like a failure, I think, to a lot of women. And I would really like for us to reframe that. That ten minutes, that's protected time for you. We hear about self care a lot, well, there's self care for your brain too. You need to actually take the time and invest in giving your brain free thinking time, time to think about the bigger picture, or time to ruminate. This is really important. There's a network in your brain called the default mode network, and this is a network that's active when you're not engaging in something specific, you're not speaking to an audience or in the middle of a meeting or on a specific task, this is just when you're sitting. This default mode network activates and kind of bubbles to the surface. And that default mode network is what's required for creativity, it's what's required for critical thinking, and it really helps your brain integrate everything else that's going on and make sense of it. So if you don't give your default mode network time to roam, then nothing else is going to congeal in your brain and you're not going to move forward. So just as people will occasionally allow themselves to take a nice bath or go get a massage for self care, taking time to just sit and think, get off your phone, get off your computer, you can have a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, that's good, I love markers and colored pencils too because maybe you want to doodle during this time, and really just think and be with yourself and give your brain that time. So that's part of working smarter, not harder, you need to give your brain the time and space that will not just take you one step forward, but that will help you leap forward.

Erica: I always tell people it's that shift from being reactive to proactive. Sometimes in the moment it can feel like a waste of time, but it's what buys you more time in the end. It's writing the entire SOP to train a team later on, you've already gotten it documented as you do it, so it's that proactive measurement. But I want to talk about this NASA stuff, this astronaut work. What did you do with them? Just give me all the details, it's so fascinating.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, well I've been a collaborator on several published research papers with NASA. And the basic gist of it is that we have data that we've published looking at NASA astronauts' brain changes resulting from spaceflight. They undergo an MRI of their brain before an International Space Station mission and then again upon return, and we look at changes in the brain associated with different durations of spaceflight. It's been fascinating, it's really interesting, especially given that space is absolutely blowing up as an area for tourism right now and for travel. Space exploration is ramping up again, the plans are for us to have a station on the Moon and from there use that as a launch base to go to Mars. And that station on the Moon is really going to be a massive area for research and development too, and really bring us a lot of science advances. And at the same time, there are several privatized space stations planned too. So I know you're going on vacation soon, Erica, maybe your next vacation will be to the moon, who knows?

Erica: No, I tell people all the time, I went skydiving one time and never again. So you're absolutely not getting my ass on a rocket ship out to the moon, especially after watching those people who had to stay out there for eight months. No way, no ma'am, no ham, no turkey.

Dr. Heather Collins: Don't want to sit on top of a rocket.

Erica: Alright girl, you have this amazing career that you've built taking these complex brain science pieces and turning them super relatable, and I think you've done an incredible job of that today. But for the woman who's listening today, if you could give her one piece of advice on this is the brain boosting action you need to take to make your brain work smarter, not harder, what should she do?

Dr. Heather Collins: Oh, I have a good one. Do you ever forget where you put your keys?

Erica: All the time.

Dr. Heather Collins: And that happens to most of us. And the funny thing is, nearly every time I speak or I'm talking with a group or doing executive leadership coaching or anything, I hear from people, I'm really worried about my memory, I'm really worried that I'm so busy I can't remember anything. And certainly this is true with your listeners, with a lot of high achieving women. And I'm here to tell you a really cool thing, forgetting where you put your keys is not actually a memory problem, it's an attention problem. So that's a behavior we need to automate. You walk into the house, you have one place where you put your keys, and that's it. So this is sort of a three part thing, if that's alright. Step number one, figure out what you can automate in your life and do it. Do you need to think about where you put your keys? No, that's really kind of a waste of your brain's effort. Your brain wants to think about really important things, not where you put your keys. So automate that, pick one place to put your keys, that's it. And by the way, this also goes for kids with their backpacks and shoes, this goes for anything you bring into the house or anything you need to take out on your way out of the house.

Erica: Making me think of the thing my mother always used to say, everything has a place and everything in its place, something like that.

Dr. Heather Collins: I mean, I think your mom might have been a secret neuroscientist, because it's absolutely true, and this is how your brain works. Same thing with going in and out of the office, all of that. So automate as much as you can because that will help reduce the stress in your brain. And stress produces a hormone called cortisol, and that makes your memory terrible, that makes your thinking terrible, it interferes with your goal setting. We want to reduce all that stress. Number two, realize when you do need to pay attention to something. That's the first thing, you can't remember something if it never makes it into your brain in the first place. So step one is we want to actually get it in there. The key is, in these everyday moments, you want to stop, realize that you need to remember something, and anchor that moment with a memory. That could be an important occurrence in a meeting, something that somebody says to you that you really want to remember, a piece of feedback that you've received, or a really great networking lunch where you've made some new contacts and you want to remember information about that. So the first step is simply pay attention and intend to make a memory, intention is really important with memory. So then once we've made our intention, we actually want to make a robust memory. Memory is really one of my favorite areas of brain research. Memory is really made by this little tiny seahorse looking structure in the center of your brain called the hippocampus. And your hippocampus is responsible for actually making sense of the outside world and deciding what gets to be made a memory and what doesn't. So we want to be intentional about it. And part of being intentional about it is that we want our hippocampus to not just act on its own, we want it to talk to other parts of the brain, because the more parts of your brain you have active while you're making a memory, the better chance you have remembering it later. So rather than just through the hippocampus, we might have five or six different routes to remembering information. Let me give you an example of this. Think of an apple. Was it a red delicious apple?

Erica: Well, it was, and then I knew you were going to ask me that, I just knew it, so then I was like, oh, I have to think of a golden delicious, so then I switched.

Dr. Heather Collins: So then it was a golden delicious. Okay, so if we say think of an apple, you're probably bringing up a memory of just, it's something I see at the grocery store. Now, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to think about holding a Granny Smith apple in your hand, the biggest one you could find. I want you to feel the heft of it in your palm as you're holding it. And I want you to notice how shiny and bright green its skin is, it might even be a little bit waxy looking, so shiny. And then you lift it up and bring it to your face and take a big bite out of it, and you can hear that crunch of that apple, and you can feel the juices that are sweet, tart, and tangy in your mouth. And this apple is so juicy, a little bit of the juice even runs down the side of your mouth and down to your chin. And as you're chewing that first bite, you swallow it and you're so excited to take another bite because that apple was amazing. Now open your eyes. Next time anybody asks you to think of an apple, that's what you're going to think about.

Erica: Oh, okay.

Dr. Heather Collins: So what we want to do to make these better memories, you want to be intentional, and then you want to try to use any kind of sensory information you can that's going to activate your brain's sensory cortices up near the top. So you want to think about, is there a smell, is there a touch, is there a taste, is there a sound, is there a sight, any of those things involved with it. The other thing is, your brain is selfish, your brain loves you, my brain loves me, so we're going to take advantage of that. Your brain remembers information directly related to you better than information that's not. So we want to think about, how does that apple impact you, how do you feel when you eat that apple, what does that apple remind you of. Maybe it reminds you of your mom baking an apple pie when you were a kid and you loved that. So you're going to take that information and anchor it to something about you. You're also going to anchor it to something you already know. Your brain has a vast amount of networks, hundreds of thousands of neurons connected that represent everything you know about the world, it's your brain's Wikipedia. So if you take new information and link it to something you already know, you're essentially creating a link to your brain's Wikipedia, and that makes it more likely you're going to remember that in the future. So these are all really simple tips, but they grow your memory capacity substantially. And when you grow your memory capacity, you can not only remember more, but you can remember things faster and easier, and that can help you become more effective and more efficient in everything you're doing, because memory is something that's at the heart of everything we do all day, every day.

Erica: So are you telling me that I am screwing up my brain because I just put an Apple tag on my keys to find them?

Dr. Heather Collins: No, no, because again, we want to automate things that aren't important, right, that's exactly what you've done.

Erica: I can't quite be as efficient as I want because my husband often drives my car since it's the bigger one and we haul the kids in it, but I was dying last night.

Dr. Heather Collins: We're not holding you responsible for it.

Erica: Because I just gotta put that Apple tag on it and move on.

Dr. Heather Collins: Right, and we're just going to tell him that he needs to put those keys in the same place every day.

Erica: Listen, if I could solve that problem, I'd be a lot richer. Oh my gosh, I love this conversation, it's incredible. You do speaking, tell me what else you do, where can people find you, how can they get in touch with you?

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, I am also still a research scientist, you don't want to read any of my published research papers unless you have insomnia, because again they're written for scientists, that's that literature. My more accessible work is on LinkedIn, and I write articles on LinkedIn exactly about what we've been talking about today, about how people can take findings from neuroscience and really apply them to their own lives to help them get where they want to go and grow their memory capacity and all those fun things. So I'm on LinkedIn, and my website is drheathercollins.com, and anybody can learn more or contact me there also.

Erica: Oh my god, I love it. And what piece of advice, this is always my favorite last question, would you give this previous version of you, the version before you came out of your dance self and into this neuroscientist, this amazing person, knowing everything you know now, and knowing everything you know about the brain?

Dr. Heather Collins: Boy, I wish I knew all of this about the brain when I was about 15, that would have saved a lot of anguish in life. What I would tell my earlier self is, don't be so hard on yourself, life and professional life, it's not one straight path, it's a curvy mountainous road, and you don't know what's coming around the corner. You could be going uphill next, or you could be going downhill, but that's part of the joy of life too. I was academically raised in this environment where everybody goes on to become a professor and that's what your professors expect you to do. And I really struggled after one of my postdoctoral fellowships with, I just don't know if that's for me, this is what I've been trained to do, I spent six years in grad school and five years in postdoctoral fellowships, and I just don't know if that's for me. And I really had to try new things, put myself out there, take risks, and figure out what was the fit. Being a neuroscientist who is a keynote speaker is not a common phenomenon, it's not a natural fit, but it combines the two things that I love and the two things I'm passionate about. So I would say expect those curves in the road, they're going to happen, and really just don't move toward what anybody else expects you to do. Just move toward what you love doing, and find little steps forward toward those things that bring you joy and contentment and fulfillment.

Erica: And pay attention to those things.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah, I think we so often don't pay attention to how much those little things light us up.

Erica: So oh my gosh, well thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your time, I'm so glad we got to do this IRL, y'all, so if you're listening, you can also check it out on YouTube. But thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Heather Collins: Thank you so much for having me, this has been fantastic.

Erica: If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself, share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless, the only thing standing in your way, those sticky floors. But guess what, you have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.