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The APB Technique – “Awareness, Pause, Breathe”

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

Staying in a positive mindset is greatly challenged in today’s complex and ever-changing work environment and for many of us it is a constant daily practice. One of the techniques used for maintaining a positive mindset is what my friend and colleague, Sharon Campbell-Rayment (www.sharoncampbellrayment .com), calls the ‘APB’ (no, not the police jargon) … it is the acronym for “Awareness, Pause, Breathe”. The APB is one of many strategies that Sharon developed during her journey back from a severe concussive brain injury.

The instant we become aware of and/or feel the negative … we immediately must take an APB … and adjust to the positive – any positive … as long as it’s a positive thought that brings a positive feeling from which to choose our behavior! The more often we execute an APB, the more automatic it becomes. Sharon has given me permission to share her writing with you on the APB – Awareness, Pause, Breathe.

Sharon writes: Awareness is the key to everything! Once you are aware of something you can change it, redirect or eliminate it altogether from your life.

When life becomes too overwhelming, too fast, and too frustrating just take 3 deep breaths and immediately the negative effects of stress begin to lessen. Your heart rate will begin to decrease, tension will release and you will become more aware of what is happening around you to help you deal with the stress you are experiencing.

So the instant you are aware of the need for adjusting to the positive, pause and take a deep breath. This will help you to regain focus, decrease the stress response and give you just a moment to think about what you are thinking about. (Did you know that it is said we have 40-50,000 thoughts per day, and the vast majority of these we are not even aware of. Yet these thoughts are affecting how we think, feel, act and respond in every moment.)

When we are under stress, we tend to breathe shallow and do not get a full invigorating shot of oxygen that we need. To get a full inhalation, focus on drawing the air in through your nose, and allow your abdominal muscles to relax – this is a time when we can let it all hang out rather than hold ourselves svelte, sexy and tight.

By relaxing your abdominal muscles you will allow your rib cage to expand, your diaphragm to extend downwards freely, your abdominal muscles to loosen and relax which allows the upper part of your lungs to fill as well. You get a full invigorating breath!

Then release, and this time tighten your abdominal muscles, to push the diaphragm up, and empty your lungs as completely as you can.

In a stressful situation three deep breaths will reset the body and begin to decrease the stress response, but I would like you to extend this practice to times that you are not feeling stress. This will assist the body to feel relaxed more often and imprint this feeling so it will become a habit and a regular part of your day.

The skill of Positive Presence™ is an innovative thought model making the connection between workplace behaviour and emotional energy, and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology of techniques and exercises for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills indicative of an energized work force.

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The ‘Why’ of Positive Power

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

The findings coming forward from the neuro-sciences have huge implications for business organizations on a global scale. And in fact, these findings call for a gigantic shift in how the modern organization develops its employees, its leaders, and the overall organization, in order to succeed in today’s global knowledge-based economy.

Research has proven that the ‘brain-power’ needed for productivity and efficiency today will only occur when we are in a state of positive emotional electro-magnetic neuro-chemical energy. In other words, the emotional state needed for productivity, efficiency, and wellness, is the same emotional state that we are in when we are joyous and happy. So your positive mindset is one of your greatest powers in an ever-increasing stressful work world.

The research also shows in fact, that the greatest risk to productivity, to work relationships, and to overall wellness in today’s workplace, is negative energy. That being said, today’s leaders need an entire toolbox to draw on to help their people consistently maintain a positive mindset.

Positive Presence is the learned skill of adjusting and creating a positive and energized mindset within yourself through conscious thought processes. This skill is best learned through real-time on-the-job practice – as you develop a keener awareness of yourself, of others, of behavior habits, and most importantly, of human energy. The skill of positive power uses the neuroplasticity of your brain to create thought habits that drive positive energy within you and positive behaviours around you.

Without your inner positive power in today’s work world, you will be easily overtaken by the stress of complexity, ambiguity, chaos and the constant lightning-fast change of today’s work environments.

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The Science of Bad Behaviour

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

A key focus of research on human performance seeks to understand the complexity and function of the human brain and its impact on performance in relationship to how people respond to leadership and colleague behaviour. Research highlights why you must consistently monitor and manage the impact your behaviour has on the performance outcomes of your team’s production and the experiential emotional memory, or EEM, your behaviour creates.

Rather than relating interactions with others with a time or place, our brains map those interactive events as a function of emotional memory. This is why leaders must be profoundly careful of the impact they have on their employees through the experience of their behaviour — and also why, as colleagues, you must be profoundly careful of the impact you have on your colleagues through the experience of each others behaviour. The brain stores experiential, emotional memory, or EEM, with a greater degree of recall than mere logic memory. It is why when you make a positive or negative behaviour impact on someone, that experience creates associated memory, positive or negative, that in turn makes any future experience with you affect thinking, emotion, and behaviour, and therefore impacts performance. Repetitive negative experiences have a negative effect on performance. Future encounters with you fires up the brain as if the event was happening for the first time and with the same degree of impact. As a leader, this can have a profound impact on the success (or failure) of a team.

A neurochemical cocktail is responsible when we continue to distrust leaders or colleagues, even when they make attempts to change course on past negative behaviour. Unless a leader (or colleague) advertises that they are seeking a behaviour change, our brain will not connect the positive change to previous stored, repetitive, negative memory. It is only through repeated new positive interactions, and a new awareness on our part to record those new behaviour events as positive, that we can rewire our brain with the associated memories of the “new you” and not the “old you” leader/colleague.

Again, this is why you must be profoundly self – aware of the impact your behaviour has on others, especially if you are a leader. Your daily choices in behaviour determine the quality of your relationships and are predictive to your performance destiny. Your positive behaviour competency is mostly born from your positive emotional thoughts and feelings. Your tendency for positive thought and emotion is intrinsically linked to your skill level of Positive Presence. You get to make a decision every day to impact people positively or negatively. The repetitive experience of behaviour determines the level of trust you create with others. That level of trust will determine the level of performance you create as well. That choice is always up to the you, so choose wisely.

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Are You Unforgettable?

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

You have probably heard the saying, “A truly great leader is hard to find, difficult to part with, and impossible to forget.” The same adage holds for bad leaders too, at least the “impossible to forget” part — this also holds for colleagues as well. Did you ever wonder why?

True story telling time: So Debbie (not her real name) is having lunch with a colleague. She has not seen her old boss in three years when suddenly, he comes through the door of the restaurant. Debbie quickly hides behind her menu. Her table mate is confused by her behaviour. Debbie is frantic that her old boss, whom she left three years ago, might have seen her. She is relieved when her table mate informs her that he dropped his keys on a table and went to the men’s room. Debbie quips out loud about her temptation to grab his keys and throw them in the trash. Her table mate is flabbergasted when Debbie informs her that they have to leave the restaurant! This really is a true story. So what is behind Debbie’s irrational behaviour?

Your brain drives all of your behaviour. From a neuroscience perspective, you might be surprised to learn that your memories are actually controlled by the way your brain works regarding memory storage and recall. This fact adds greater significance to a science based understanding as to why a leader’s behaviour is the singular most important predictor to a team’s performance. It is also a key predictor to employee engagement and individual performance as well.

You can have immediate and vivid recall of past bad leadership experiences because your brain doesn’t recall memory with an associated time stamp. The hippocampus is the part of your brain responsible for memory storage and recall. Working with a memory pattern recognition system, when you experience a new episodic event similar to a previous traumatic experience (Debbie seeing her old boss after three years), your brain recalls associated memory complete with all of the negative feelings that go with it. It’s like you reloading a document from stored computer memory, only without a time and date stamp on the memory and the emotional baggage the memory produces.

Learning the skill of Positive Presence will ensure that you are always aware of how your behaviour impacts all those around you. You learn how to read the energy in the room and the behavioural nuances. You learn the power of a positive mindset and the behaviours of collaboration and connection that are necessary for success in any workplace.

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How is Your Focus?

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

Focus is a fundamental requirement in today’s workplace. In the knowledge workforce focus is necessary for productivity and efficiency; It’s necessary for quality and for safety; It’s necessary for self-awareness; And it’s also necessary for the practices of mindfulness and meditation. A colleague of mine who suffered from alcohol addiction, found it impossible to focus for any length of time. This lack of focus blocked her ability to do the meditation and prayer taught in the 12-step Program she was participating in for a sober life. She was however, able to re-wire her brain and train herself for focus and meditation, and she shares her story in her book “Madly Chasing Peace – How I went from Hell to Happy in Nine Minutes a day”, by Dina Proctor.

Dina is a bestselling author, speaker, and coach for corporations and individuals. She developed a very simple and quick technique to focus within. Dina’s 9-minutes a day, 3×3 Technique (3 minutes, 3 times a day) delivers impactful changes and has earned the support of co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Jack Canfield, renowned cell-biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, professional coach and teacher Bob Doyle from The Secret, and a featured presence on Maria Shriver’s blog, among many others. Dina has given me permission to share her technique which is found on page 141 of her book.

“Many times I will do nothing more than sit quietly with my eyes closed and count how many times my heart beats during the three minutes. When I first started meditating, I tried counting how many breaths I took but kept getting distracted – maybe because there was so much time between breaths that my mind had a chance to wander. For whatever reason, putting a hand over my chest to feel and count my heartbeats with my eyes closed keeps me completely focused. Even if my thoughts are negative or overwhelming before I sit down to meditate, distracting myself with this little task always gives me relief.

It also helps for me to have a mantra or some words I can repeat over and over to give my crazy mind something to put its focus on. My favorite mantra that I use when I’m feeling overwhelmed, anxious or paralyzed with fear is: “I’m open, I’m willing. Show me. Guide me from within.” This mantra puts space around whatever thoughts are choking me and creates an opening inside of me for willingness, letting go and a bit of peace. You can choose whatever words suit you. Other examples are:
a) “I know there is another way to approach this. Just because I can’t see it right now doesn’t mean it’s not there. I am open to the possibility of a new idea, a new way of doing this.”
b) “There is space inside me for new ideas to flow in and to show themselves. I don’t have all the answers and I don’t need to. I’m open to new ideas.”

It can be as easy as setting the timer on your phone for three minutes, three times a day. If you find at first three minutes is just too long to do this, then start with just one minute and increase the timer by 15 seconds every day until you’ve made it to the three minute mark. You will soon notice that the three minutes flies by in no time at all. It is in these moments of total focus that your emotional energy is in harmony within you and around you. It is in these moments of total focus that you are at peak performance.

This is an example of just one of many techniques/exercises for training your brain for focus. Using your innate skill of Positive Presence will create the necessary thought habits for a focused brain. Learning the skill of Positive Presence provides you with a plethora of tools, exercises and techniques that will lead you to a greater capacity for achieving peak performance, for building and maintaining good relationships, and for experiencing good health.

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Accountability Behaviour

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

“Leaders lead”, as the old saying goes. This is a simplistic view of what leaders actually do; it does not take into account the fact that not everything a leader does is worth following. So let’s revise this saying to be more specific: “Leaders lead by modeling effective behaviour.” In today’s complex organizations everyone must be an influential leader. Influential leaders are role models of accountability. Their appropriate behaviour comes from a conscious choice to live by their conviction, to change harmful mental models, and to manage their emotions. Their appropriate behaviour is a result of their well-developed skill of Positive Presence.

For example, In health care this choice extends to the way they view their enormous responsibility for other people – from the internal senior management team to governing board to employees to physicians and other clinical providers to the patient population to the community at large. Accountability is a practical instrument that influential leaders use to keep themselves and those around them honest, focused, productive, and positive. Influential leaders know that an organization devoid of accountability is nothing but a collection of people who shift blame, feel victimized, procrastinate, and disguise their incompetence.

Another way leaders role-model accountability is to always, in any challenging situation or conflict, ask “how did I contribute to this problem?” This simple question must be followed by an actual evaluation of the leader’s role, because just posing the question is as good as screaming, “I didn’t do it!” This show of genuine concern indicates to others that the leader sees herself as accountable not only for the problem but also for the solution. Without the use of accountability and feedback you will be leading in the dark.

While accountability is effective in establishing behaviour based expectations for performance, the key is to remain focused on improved and effective behaviour change. Repeating ineffective behaviour that is revealed in feedback and accountability ultimately creates a great deal of damage to any relationship. Acknowledging a mechanism that identifies a behaviour that needs to changed is only of value when there is a commitment to actually changing the behaviour. The key is, to move out of the past and focus on the change that’s desired.

Accountability is a backward looking process. The focus must be on what the change is going to be and how to put it into practice moving forward. Accountability is like an MRI – it identifies what’s broken – you will still need to fix the problem. That comes with personal responsibility for the accountability process of daily purposeful and intentional alignment between what you say you believe and how you actually behave. Creating a culture of accountability and change by introducing the Skill of Positive Presence is a simple and affordable practice to put into place, moving the process forward.

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Accountability for Collaborative Success

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

Accountability must be a visible practice In creating an organization that is built for collaborative success. All team members are clear about their specific responsibilities. They are aware of the organization’s purpose, mission, vision, values, and how they fit into this framework. They are given measures and tools to use in this framework. They are given measures and tools to use in determining if they are moving forward or falling behind on their objectives. They are empowered to do their job, and they are rewarded for their efforts. The result is a high level of employee engagement with a vested interest in the success of the organization.

Accountability is indispensable in collaboration because the work is interrelated. For example, if one team member makes an error or falls behind schedule, she must report it to the rest of the team to stem the consequences; failure to disclose a problem in one part could potentially damage the entire work. In addition, taking responsibility for errors is easier in a collaborative setting, where the focus is on correction rather than on blame. Thus, fear of retribution is minimal (if it even exists) allowing a more honest exchange among team members. In this environment of emotional safety the upper brain performs at a higher level to drive performance because the negative energy of the fear factor is non-existent.

In a traditional culture with command and control leadership, however, the opposite is true. Although management demands and praises the value of accountability, it does not provide the resources and environment that enable accountability to flourish. This absence results in widespread confusion, distrust, and underachievement. Fear is the operative emotion driving lower brain behaviour for self-preservation and an impediment to performance thinking. Influential leaders are aware of these pitfalls and thus behave, and urge others to behave, in a manner that promotes safety, trust, accountability, and commitment to outcomes, all of which can only exist within positive emotional human energy. And all of which behaviours are present when using your skill of Positive Presence.

One way leaders can role-model accountability is transparency – to admit their own mistakes and vulnerabilities in the face of various responsibilities. For example, the leader can share a story in which he “dropped the ball” on an important project. He can explain the steps he took to recover from this event. The story can then be turned into a teaching moment that may inspire others to change their approach to avoid the negative outcome experienced by the storyteller. The point of this exercise, which is called power of story, is to show that a lack of accountability has the power to weaken even a strong performer and thus needs to be managed with vigilance.

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Why Stress is Harmful

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

In today’s fast paced and ever changing business climate, the most dangerous thing about stress is how easily it can creep up on you. You get used to it. It starts to feel familiar, even normal. You don’t notice how much it’s affecting you, even as it takes a heavy toll.

The signs and symptoms of stress overload can be almost anything. Stress affects the mind, body, and behavior in many ways, and everyone experiences stress differently. Not only can overwhelming stress lead to serious mental and physical health problems, it can also take a toll on your relationships at home and at work.

The stress hormones, most notably adrenaline and cortisol, erode higher-brain networks, inhibiting you from succeeding fully at life. Chronic stress means the stress response system is turned on nearly full-time, releasing toxic hormones into your system, and shutting down the ‘creative and executive’ parts of your brain. Stress hormones, when continuously in your system can even shrink your higher brain networks responsible for creativity and decision-making. Stress hormones can impair the immune system, ruin the cardiovascular system, and damage chromosomes producing cancer cells and cause premature aging. At work, stress dampens performance, thwarts teamwork, leads people to make bad decisions, and accounts for nearly half of turnover.

Because of the widespread damage stress can cause, it’s important to know your own limit. But just how much stress is “too much” differs from person to person. We’re all different. Some people are able to roll with the punches, while others seem to crumble in the face of far smaller obstacles or frustrations. Some people even seem to thrive on the excitement and challenge of a high-stress lifestyle and/or work environment.

Your ability to tolerate stress depends on many factors, including the quality of your relationships, your general outlook on life, your emotional intelligence, and genetics. Having the necessary knowledge and awareness, and then mitigating the stress using techniques appropriate for you personally, is essential in today’s workplace.

In today’s organizations, when a company hires an employee, they are essentially hiring that person’s brain and hoping it’s a smart brain that will grow even smarter with experience. But place that person in a high pressure work environment without the tools to transcend stress, and the likelihood is that he or she will lose brain capacity. In reality, stress can drain organizational brain power.

The most important aptitude you can bring to any work-place is your awareness of how stress affects your brain (and your physical and emotional wellness) and how to personally mitigate your stress. Learning the skill of Positive Presence provides you with the tools, exercises and techniques that will allow you to overcome the inevitable harm from the stress of today’s chaotic, fast-paced, and ever-changing work environments.

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Work-Stress and You

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

Modern life is full of hassles, deadlines, frustrations, and demands. For many people, stress is so commonplace that it has become a way of life. Stress isn’t always bad. In small doses, it can help you perform under pressure and motivate you to do your best. But when you’re constantly running in emergency mode, your mind and body pay the price.

Stress is a normal physical response to events that make you feel threatened or that upset your balance in some way (whether you know it or not). In the workplace, for many people, any amount of change at all can trigger stress, especially if it’s perceived to be unwanted change. When you sense danger—whether it’s real or imagined—your body’s defenses kick into high gear in a rapid, automatic process known as the “fight-or-flight-or-freeze” reaction, or the ‘stress response.’

In today’s fast paced and ever changing business climate, the most dangerous thing about stress is how easily it can creep up on you. You get used to it. It starts to feel familiar, even normal. You don’t notice how much it’s affecting you, even as it takes a heavy toll.

The signs and symptoms of stress overload can be almost anything. Stress affects the mind, body, and behavior in many ways, and everyone experiences stress differently. Not only can overwhelming stress lead to serious mental and physical health problems, it can also take a toll on your relationships at home and at work.

So how do you protect yourself from stress? Well first, you have to be aware that it’s happening — so self-awareness is critical. Being aware that you’re stressed isn’t always easy. It does require a huge amount of self-awareness, and self-awareness is very difficult for most people. Self-awareness is in fact a learned skill. It takes time to create the necessary thought-habits that will lead to your personal awareness.

Learning the skill of Positive Presence provides you with the tools, exercises and techniques to create those thought-habits that will lead to self-awareness. At the heart of the skill of Positive Presence is your innate ability to adjust for and create a positive and energized mindset through conscience thought processes – you are in essence ‘re-wiring’ your brain to protect yourself from the ill-affects of stress.

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High-Performance Behaviour

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Catherine Osborne

The findings coming from the neurosciences is proving that the ‘brain-power’ needed for productivity and efficiency in today’s work environment can only be attained when you are in a state of positive emotional electro-magnetic neuro-chemical energy.   This state requires (and/or depends on) your ability to create a flow of positive thoughts and feelings amid the chaos, the change, and the ambiguity of today’s work environment.

Your behaviour it turns out, is one of the key informants to identifying what and how you are thinking and feeling.  Behaviour it turns out is, for the most part, the physical manifestation of your human energy flow.

Neuroscientists, looking at cognitive functioning and behaviour at the individual level have suggested, simply put:

  • We can assess our personal energy flow through our feelings.
  • Feelings such as happiness and optimism can be linked to a positive energy flow, and feelings such as anger and frustration can be linked to a negative energy flow
  • We can control our feelings with our thoughts.
  • It is through our thought process that we choose how to behave.
  • And the bottom line is …. the measurable result of a person’s energy flow is reflected by one’s choice of behaviour.

So here are just a few of those behaviours that will be present when you are in a positive energy state:

  • Consistently constructive action that betters everyone’s work-life
  • Easily set priorities and stick to task
  • Compassionate and empathetic
  • Consistently calm, rational, generous, and loving
  • Self-controlled
  • A strong agent for change
  • A collaborative worker.
  • High Emotional intelligence

The skill of Positive Presence is your innate ability to adjust for and create a positive and energized mindset through conscience thought processes – you are in essence ‘re-wiring’ your Brain.  Learning the skill of Positive Presence and the self-awareness that comes with it, allows you consciously create the kind of thought-habits that lead the behaviours of performance excellence.

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