Natalie King investigates the role of neuroscience in business

Natalie King

Natalie King, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher, Liautaud Institute


What inspires you to show up at work every day?


In my current role as senior researcher at the Liautaud Institute, I investigate the role of neuroscience in business and help to create and implement leadership development programs based on principles of brain-based behavior change. Knowing what I do has the potential to positively impact people’s lives in a major way is very gratifying. The Institute is new so the atmosphere is like that of a start-up, very fast-paced and changes daily, that in and of itself gets me up in the morning because I never know what to expect.

How did you determine your career path?
Coming from a strong Caribbean background — Jamaican and Cuban — it was so natural for me to gravitate toward education. As a child, my parents would not allow us to play outside until my sister and I would read a book, so education was/is taken very seriously in my culture and in my household. My sister would always come home from school and teach me everything she had learned that day because I was too young to attend and when I finally got my chance at 4 years old, I aimed to do my best. I was the child who wanted to do everything and be every profession but by the time I got to college at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama, I settled upon becoming a doctor. The only problem is that I had competing interests and I decided to try my hand in the fashion industry post receiving my Bachelor of Science in biology. In the process of investigating fashion schools, because I loved to design clothing and wanted to perhaps get a chance to walk down the runways myself, the University of Illinois at Chicago called and asked if I would be interested in participating in a new Doctor of Neuroscience program and if I did, I had one month to prepare ☺ I only mention this drawn out story to highlight the fact that sometimes you don’t choose a career, sometimes, it chooses you! Now, I had no idea what I truly wanted to do but when a school calls and basically gives you $250,000 in scholarship money, aka free ride, you take it and you thank God. Graduate school was a challenge, not because it was hard academically but because I was 1) Immature (20 years old, the youngest in grad school and in my program); 2) African American and a woman, it was complicated to balance expectations and constantly felt pressure to break stereotypes, even if they were just in my head); and 3) Being a part of a new program is good and bad, as you will have to go through a lot of the growing pains with the programmatic issues. 4) Competing focuses grad school vs. fashion modeling I was told I needed to choose or I wouldn’t be great.
Needless to say, by my third year in graduate school, I was 23 years old and mature enough to know I did not need to listen to what others were telling me especially if they had never traveled that rode before. I realized that if I wanted to have competing focuses, I just had to learn how to keep quiet, do what needed to be done when I was in either arena, and learn to balance my time. Graduate school is a little bit more fluid that most people think and it really makes a difference when you have a professor who values your independence and allows you to have your own life outside of school. So balancing was not as hard as one would think. The complication was just learning to manage myself. I’ve never been signed to any agencies so finding my own work and opportunities was different but I preferred it that way so I could accept jobs I knew I would be able to devote my undivided attention to. I also participated in a lot of competitions as well, with my two major contracts being products of that. (Johnson’s Products Gentle Treatment Box Model and Black Opal Cosmetics) Currently, I do the same type of balancing act I’ve always done, I find out about an opportunity and take the chance to put myself out there with my most recent being JET Magazine’s Beauty of the Week and the First Doctor to grace their Digital Monthly Spread!


Describe the skill sets that are essential to future business leader and innovators?
Disclaimer: The term “business” is a word that means so much more than running a traditional “brick and mortar” as most people are familiar with. It’s important for especially young people to realize that even if they never open up a physical building in their life, they still would have been business owners and that’s through successfully managing their own personal brand. Now, more than ever, its important for young people to realize that the way they carry themselves in public, online, at their workplaces, and in their personal lives is all totaling up to their “personal brand” and that should receive just as much care, attention, and maintenance as any traditional brick and mortar would.

I believe future (and current) business leaders should develop an inquisitive mind and basically remain curious (I’m not sure when people started to believe that curiosity was just for children but that’s a total lie and a grave injustice to society) Besides the obvious reason why one would be curious, for instance, just wanting to learn new things, this skill is particularly important for business leaders and innovators to have because it keeps you at the forefront of what is going on and in terms of innovation, you need to know what the societal pain points are to help solve these problems. How can you do that if you never ask questions and seek to find answers?

Next, business leaders and innovators should have a global mindset. We all love technology and social media but more important than its obvious function of allowing you to connect with old friends, its also allowing you to connect with new ones and is essentially making the world a much smaller place than it once was (hopefully more tolerant as well). In terms of business, being able to connect with other cultures and understand the way they operate is crucial for making worldwide impact and I once heard it described this way “Having a global mindset means the ability to avoid the simplicity of assuming all cultures are the same, and at the same time, not being paralyzed by the complexity of the differences.” (worldwideerc.org). Having a global mindset is important for innovation because all types of minds and perspectives are needed to create better solutions.

Lastly, I believe business leaders and innovators need to be their absolute best at developing networking skills. Learning to forge meaningful and relevant relationships has clear benefits for everyone especially those seeking to be a change agent of any kind.

Define innovative methods you apply to your business and life.
Here’s my list:
-Embrace Risk-Especially when it comes to career choices, I always try to push myself in to new territory even if it makes me feel extremely uncomfortable at first.
-Learn to articulate my ideas better. Shama Kabani, a business strategist and contributor for Forbes states that the cornerstone of innovation is communication and I couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t matter how great your ideas are or how great you are as a person, if you cant communicate this in a meaningful way, you’ll remain stagnant.
-Never be the smartest in the room, for one, it’s boring and two, I don’t learn anything. I try to seek out places where I will learn the most.
-Have a mission that’s larger than myself, I will never get complacent if I have this.
– I think big but I try to perfect the small and the now, I got this from thinkwithGoogle. Everyone wants to be on top but they forget the top mostly consists of people who became really great at doing a lot of really small things exceptionally well.
-Stay curious, Ideas are everywhere

How do you set goals and evaluate your success?
Being a natural and a trained researcher, when I’ve set my sights on a new goal for myself, I find out everything there is to know about it and create something of a vision board. I also take time to write them down, whether that’s with actual paper and pen or in the notepad function on my iPhone. Outside of that, I wouldn’t say I have a clear goal setting ‘strategy’ outside of knowing what the larger mission is for each area of my life: financial, career, personal etc. I don’t necessarily break those down into smaller goals, although I think I could learn to use this technique in order to be more efficient. So based on my larger mission, I mainly choose or seek out opportunities that best fit and will lead me in the right direction toward completion. I evaluate success by the way I feel. I may not necessarily achieve whatever it is I had originally set out to do but as long as I know I put 110 percent into it, I’m generally satisfied. (It’s the same way I judge ‘failure’ as well)

Names three books that changed how you saw life that you would recommend to others.
I’m an avid reader so on any given day, I’m reading from 3-5 books either for work or leisure, I’ll usually alternate to break up the monotony. Of course the Bible is a mainstay, my father was a Pastor and so that’s where my foundation is but my secular favorites I’ve read in the last year include: The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, it’s a great narrative about finding your destiny, The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, highlights the differences in self-confidence between women and men and takes an interesting perspective on why more women aren’t at the top. Lastly, I’m a huge Eric Thomas fan so his book The Secret to Success is an excellent read.
(Fourth favorite, even though I wasn’t asked ☺ Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim Grover, talks about the skills and traits possessed by some of the worlds greatest athletes)

Describe why lifelong learning is important to you?
Lifelong learning means everything to me primarily because its something that is always changing, expanding and becoming more readily available on a daily basis. If I want to remain at the cutting edge, I have to stay on top of what’s current and continue to throw out old ideas that are no longer relevant. For me, being an African American woman of mixed heritage, there is also a huge historical component to why I feel it’s so important to take advantage of learning. Not too long ago, we as people of color were not able to participate in growth activities like attending school, so I make it my personal responsibility to take advantage of where we are in society and the blessings I have been given through education and knowledge.

What are the three most important factors of being a successful woman?
1) Confidence- this is an area where I have to put in consistent work on a minute-by-minute basis because it is simply not natural to me. On a daily basis, as a women in two fields heavily dominated by men, the feeling of needing to “prove” myself runs rampant and having high confidence staves off the issue of believing I need to defend myself and frees me to focus on things that really matter. I owe no one an explanation of my accomplishments and confidence allows me to remain thankful and humble without feeling the need to be self-deprecating amongst people who look nothing like me.

2) Boldness and Thinking BIG (I’ve heard it said, “If it doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough”) Gender Roles don’t apply to me and I would like to think myself as something of a Feminist but to keep it simple, the statement, I believe I can do anything and everything is a very real concept in my life.

Technology plays what role in your daily life?
Everything I do revolves around technology. As a researcher, I’m always gleaning information from the web or communicating with current or potential partners for the Institute through LinkedIn and other sources. It honestly permeates every part of my life.

What social media or digital tool has made the biggest difference in your life and why?
IFTTT- it stands for “If This Then That” This is an extremely powerful tool. A lot of individuals are really busy so this tool allows one to, and I quote, “put the internet to work for you.” The best way to explain it is by quoting how they describe themselves “IFTTT is a service that enables users to connect different web applications (e.g. Facebook, Ever note, Weather, Dropbox, etc.) together through simple conditional statements known as ‘Recipes’” Basically I can create a recipe that says every time I like a post on Facebook or Instagram, I want it to automatically download itself into my dropbox folder without me ever having to actually do the work myself. It’s such a time saver and has allowed me to make seamless connections between two applications I would have never thought to link otherwise.

Also, I’m not sure how many people know that you can create your own customized Google search engine but it allows you to select which sites you want to specifically search through so it essentially cuts out a lot of the noise from sites you aren’t interested in. With 2 billion websites out there, this is a really beneficial tool.

If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
As a generation, we are getting more tolerant of other cultures and ideas but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The inability to honor the differences in others or put power and ego aside to have useful conversations is still a huge issue in society. Human nature and the brain are tough opponents but I believe we really could and need to try and do better. Failure to do so, I believe, plays out in large and small scales on a daily basis from basic issues and disagreements within family structures (small issues or issues that affect just you and your circle of influence) to issues we are now witnessing in the Middle East (large issues or issues that essentially could and do effect us all).

(Sidebar: I also wish we could learn to truly connect more as well, Facebook and Instagram shouldn’t be used as substitutes for real connection.)

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My personality tends to care too much; I’m incredibly sensitive and can pick up on subtle nuances and changes in behavior. It’s a lot to process on a daily basis but I usually try to keep in mind, it can be useful if used in the right way and it’s part of what makes me unique.

Who or what motivates you and why?
A lot of things motivate me:
-My drive to take care of my family.
-My best self motivates me. Knowing I don’t have to stay the person I am today and that I can always change and be more keeps me going.
-Looking in my FB box or other social media platforms to find someone has left a message to let me know I inspire him or her is great. I don’t always get a chance to respond in a timely fashion but they are always appreciated.
-People in my life motivate me: family, significant other, people I meet through my work. I find inspiration in them all.
-Life inspires me. Everyone does not get the chance to see another day so I’m reminded to be grateful, even when it’s challenging.

What are the dos and don’ts for young women in business?
-Do seek out mentors- both female and male; focus on where you want to go and choose accordingly. No one is too big to reach out to.
-Do develop habits of listening; making others feel great, and showing appreciation, these will take you far, regardless of what profession you are in
-Do focus on being indispensible. You aren’t paid for your time, you’re paid for your value to the marketplace (Jim Rohn)
– Do figure out if you want to be in a supportive role or the no. 1 person and act accordingly. It’s natural for women to instinctually slide into that ‘supportive’ way of operating in business (and other) settings but set your limits and stick to them. You’re no ones doormat
-Never say yes, when you really mean no. If you can’t fulfill an obligation, simply say no. It’s better than not following through. People will value your honesty and potentially keep you on the radar for other opportunities. You wont always get a second chance
-Never blur the lines, or allow someone else to blur them for you. Lead with your mind and if the person does not respect your boundaries, respect yourself enough to walk away. Opportunities aren’t in short supply

How do you successfully grow from business failure?
Its interesting we are taught from a young age to avoid failures at all costs, papers marked with red pen marks give me post traumatic stress reactions of grade school and somehow now as an adult, I am supposed to embrace it and magically be comfortable. Its a difficult feeling, especially being a 23- year student like myself, to shake (I’ve been in school since age 4) however its important to remember that although I’ve been a perfectionist for most of my life, Its imperative to leave room to fail. In the words of one of my all-time favorites, Steve Jobs “ You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” When you fail personally or as a business, character building takes place and here are some of the things you gain:

-Humility
-Resilience
-Poise
-Experience

If you are not failing every once in a while, it means two things 1) You’re not stretching yourself enough and probably playing it too safe and 2) You aren’t allowing yourself to build character that will sustain your position once you arrive at the places your talent has been able to take you.

Name three most successful female role models and why?
This list was tough to narrow down

-Queen Rania of Jordan- She’s not only stunning but she is exceptionally talented and educated. Since marrying the King of Jordan, she’s used her platform to advocate for children’s rights, women’s rights, and education.

-Oprah- Even though Oprah came from a rather tumultuous background, through hard work and dedication, she is now one of the most powerful women in the world and that contrast speaks a lot to me because I see a lot of myself in her story. She now has a global presence that’s unrivaled and that level of influence is something I constantly aspire to.
-Michele Obama –To me, this woman represents having it all even though she makes it look incredibly easy. She, like the others I’ve listed, use their platforms in the most amazing ways and positively use who they are and the blessings they have been given to effect change on a large-scale. Mrs. Obama focuses on educating youth and health initiatives, which are two areas close to my heart, and even still, just as powerful as she is in her own right, she makes it a point to support and build up her powerful spouse and raise her amazing daughters. This, all done with impeccable style and grace, keeps me aiming high in both my personal and professional life.

Favorite quote: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. Rob Siltanen with participation of Lee Clow.

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