It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions

Are you using AI - or is it using you? Every time you hand a thinking task to AI without noticing, you're making a quiet choice about which mental muscles to keep training and which to let go quiet. Most people never make that choice consciously. This episode is about what happens when you do. Dr. Pauldy Otermans is a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist who helped build one of the first...

What's actually happening when you finally stop, and why your brain needs more than a holiday to recover from it It's day one of your time off. The out-of-office is on, the laptop is closed. And then your hand finds your phone, not because anything's wrong, just to check. You close it again, and nothing settles. That night you're lying in bed replaying something from weeks ago. You...

The strategy built in minutes. The brief drafted before the meeting ended. The answer retrieved before the question was fully formed. Everything faster. Everything smoother. And somewhere in that efficiency, something quietly shifting. This episode is about what happens to the brain when AI takes the cognitive load, what gets offloaded, what stops being encoded, and what leaders need to deliberate...

Brain Capital - The Asset Nobody's Managing. Why the Most Important Asset in Your Organisation Is the One Nobody Is Measuring Most organisations manage their buildings, their technology, their financial capital with rigour and intention. The cognitive capacity of the people doing the thinking, the brains running every meeting, every decision, every strategy, is largely unmanaged, often activel...

The apartment in front of the ocean. The titles. The recognition. Everything on paper looking exactly right. And underneath it, something slowly, quietly, falling apart. This episode is about high-functioning burnout: what it looks like from the inside before it breaks, why the people closest to you don't see it, and why the system you need to read the warning signs is the same system being qu...

You Know the Science. So Why Hasn't Anything Changed?   Why insight and behaviour change are two different neurological events, and what to do about it You've read the books. You've been in the workshops. Something clicked. And then Monday arrived, and you were exactly the same person you were before. This isn't a motivation problem. It isn't a discipline problem. It's a ne...

Sixteen episodes. One argument underneath all of them. In this Season 1 finale, Virginia Palm names what the show has been building toward, and what it means for Season 2. In this episode: Why your brain was never the problem, and what actually was The thread that ran through every solo episode without being named What Yasmina and Monika showed about what happens when you stop fighting your brain...

Your Nervous System Is the Room   Why the state of your nervous system is the most powerful - and least measured - variable in your organisation There's a kind of meeting everyone has sat in. The tension nobody names. The flatness where there should be energy. Everyone feels it and nobody says a word. Most leaders assume that's a communication problem, or a culture problem. The neuroscienc...

Brain Fog Isn't Laziness. It's Biology. What's actually happening when your thinking goes offline - and how to work with it You sit down to work. The task is in front of you. The time is there. And then... nothing. Not tiredness exactly. Something denser. You re-read the same sentence three times and it doesn't land. You're present, technically, but your thinking feels like it&...

The Execution Gap: Why Knowing Isn't Enough   What's actually happening in the gap between what you know and what you do You know what you're supposed to do. You've read the book, listened to the podcast, had the conversation with yourself on a Sunday night. And then Monday happens. By Wednesday evening you notice the gap - the quiet sigh, the small  of course , the familiar note t...

The Leader Who Runs on KPIs - and Finally Built One for Her Brain Monika Redzko-Otto is a CFO and COO working across Poland, Germany and Portugal. She runs finance and operations inside an automated industrial environment - machines moving at six metres per second, AI being introduced to teams that never had to think about cognitive load before. She tracks margins, KPIs, and operational metrics. S...

Why Your Brain Resists Change - Even When You Want It The neuroscience of why good intentions aren’t enough - and what actually is You’ve made the decision. A real one. And then, almost without noticing, you don’t follow through. Not because you forgot. Because something in you quietly steered around it. And then comes the story: I don’t have enough willpower. I know what I should do and I just do...

Why collective intelligence isn't about who's in the room, it's about what the room makes possible You've been in that meeting. The one where something clicked - where the thinking built on itself and the group arrived somewhere none of them could have reached alone. You've also been in the other kind. Same people, same agenda, completely flat. The difference wasn't talent....

The Brain That Had to Build Its Own Map - What a Diplomat's Daughter Learned About Trust, Belonging, and Leading Without a Fixed North You grew up in one place, with one culture, one set of rules for how things work. You absorbed them, and they held you. But what happens to the brain when none of that was ever stable? When the environment kept changing and you had to build your own internal refere...

The Most Expensive Brain in the Room - What Leadership Actually Costs, and How to Stop Paying for It Twice You get to the end of the day. On paper, it was a good one. You led the meeting. You navigated the difficult conversation. You kept the room steady. And you are completely, disproportionately exhausted, in a way that doesn't quite match what the day looked like from the outside. That'...

The Conditions for Your Best Thinking - A Personal Protocol for Cognitive Performance You've protected the morning. No meetings. Inbox closed. You sit down to do the work that actually matters — and nothing quite arrives. You're not tired. You're not distracted. You're just somehow not there. That's not a discipline problem. It's a conditions problem. In this episode, Virginia Palm explores what a...

The Smartest Thing Nobody Said   Why Your Team's Best Thinking Never Makes It Into the Room Every team has a meeting where the outcome is less than the sum of the people in it. Where the best thinking stays unspoken. Where the right question never gets asked. Where someone knew something important, and said nothing. That gap isn't a communication problem. It's a neurological one. In th...

When AI Helps - And When It Doesn’t What Your Brain Actually Needs to Think Well in an AI-Accelerated World AI is speeding up work. But the human brain doesn’t scale with speed. In this episode, Virginia Palm explores what actually happens inside your cognition when AI compresses time, increases output, and quietly intensifies decision-making. Why does work feel heavier inside supposedly “smarter”...

The Human Layer of AI: Why So Many Transformations Struggle AI is being rolled out across organizations at speed. New tools, copilots, and automation layers promise efficiency and scale. And yet, many leaders notice something quieter happening beneath the surface: more output, but less clarity more activity, but thinner judgment more speed, but heavier cognitive load In this episode of  It’s me. Y...

You’re not suddenly “worse at deciding.” Your decisions feel heavier because your brain is being asked to operate under increasing speed, pressure, and visibility, with less time to recover in between. In this episode of  It’s me. Your Brain. , Virginia explores why decision-making feels more effortful in modern work environments, and how speed, complexity, and constant demands quietly change the...

Why Your Brain Hates Constant Context Switching (and What It’s Costing You) You’re not distracted because you lack discipline. You’re tired because your brain is being asked to switch contexts all day long. In this episode of  It’s me. Your Brain. , Virginia explores why constant interruptions, emails, messages, meetings, notifications, and mental to-do lists, quietly exhaust the brain and degrade...

Staying Clear When Everything Is Urgent Back-to-back meetings. Shifting priorities. Decisions arriving faster than you can fully process them. Nothing is technically wrong, but your thinking feels narrower, your patience thinner, and everything takes more effort than it should. This is the state many leaders operate in for large parts of the day. In this episode of  It’s Me. Your Brain. , Virginia...

Most high-performing leaders don’t wake up unmotivated. They wake up mentally overbooked. In this first episode of  It’s Me. Your Brain . , Virginia explores why mental clarity isn’t about discipline, willpower, or optimizing your morning, it’s about how regulated your nervous system is before the day even begins. You’ll learn: Why your brain goes into “reactive mode” the moment you reach for your...