How We Break with Vincent Deary

The Evolving Leader

In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Professor Vincent Deary. Vincent is a writer, researcher and a practitioner health psychologist. He's a professor of psychology at Northumbria University and a former clinical fatigue specialist at the Cresta fatigue clinic. He has also worked as a cognitive behavioural therapist with an interest in researching new interventions. In 2015, the first part of Vincent’s ‘How To Live’ trilogy ‘How We Break’ was published, followed in 2024 by ‘How We Break’, where the focus is on what happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits.

Referenced during this episode:

How We Are: The Force of Habit and the Work of Change
How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
The Cresta Fatigue Clinic

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. What led you to practice and study cognitive behavioural therapy? (00:06:21)

3. What is it that drives you to care for people? (00:08:42)

4. “Introduction and orientation, they are not a threat”. Can you elaborate on that for us? (00:11:12)

5. You set out to write your first of three books age 50. Did you intend to write a trilogy or did it evolve as you were writing? (00:15:10)

6. Who are your books aimed at? (00:17:37)

7. It’s a deep read that you have to get into. In your first book ‘How We Are’ you write about how we habituate and how automaticity runs our lives. Why did you start there? (00:19:32)

8. Your second book, ‘How We Break’ suggests that people are feeling prolonged periods of difficulty and then become unhappy, worried, hopeless and exhausted. Can you expand on that please? (00:25:41)

9. You observe that tired people often function at a high level but have lost the capacity to switch off. How do you persuade people that the fatigue clinic would benefit when it comes to their compulsion to work? (00:30:42)

10. What are you doing to help people figure out how to do this in the context of reality as opposed to going off on a retreat or similar? (00:36:02)

11. What do you do to help people recover from that position of being highly adrenalized to being relaxed? (00:38:51)

12. Picking up on the micro renewal idea, what are ways in which people who face externalised demand can sustain their wellbeing even within the difficult reality that they might live in? (00:43:03)

13. In the book you talk about having a healthy relationship with yourself. What have you learnt about yourself in that? (00:49:19)

14. What do leaders need to do differently to help create a better environment? (00:53:15)