Why Lead with Your Whole Brain

Is your organization falling short of achieving its full potential?  Where do stress and failure to plan come from?  Why do we make uncomplicated relationships complicated?  Why are some people so negative most of the time? Why do we make excuses rather than taking full responsibility for our actions even though we know that we should?

 

We are constantly challenged to adapt and learn new things, but we seem to be stuck falling short of our own expectations and the expectations of others that are important to us

The answers are simple!  Experts validate that we use 1-5% of our potential. To be in a position to fully realize our potential, we need to learn to:

1. Fully utilize our brains and stop taking our brains for granted because it is a free resource!
2. Be constantly developing new more productive habits. We need to break the habit of making excuses. Experts agree that 99% of our failures come from people that make excuses and 85% take no personal responsibility for their actions
3. Better understand how our thoughts, attitudes, habits, and behaviors affect the results that we attain or the gap that exists between what we desire and what we achieve.

Our brains affect how we take in new information and learn new things and are hardwired to produce goals and results; feelings and emotions; direct how we interact with other people; and provide us with our vision. Our brain affects our analytical, creative, rational, and operational intelligence.

Let’s examine Freud’s view of the Conscious and Unconscious Human Mind

As long ago as the time of Hippocrates, around 400 BC, it was known that the brain was divided into two halves with each half performing different functions and being responsible for different thinking.

Fast forward to 1928. William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated lawyer and Ph.D., published Emotions of Normal People laying the foundation for DiSC, a categorization of the behaviors present in every human being, to some degree.

These quadrants defined and described by Marston as Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance represented the first step in a long and complicated formula to help human beings truly understand themselves.

In the 1950s, physician Roger Sperry discovered that each half of the brain was responsible for different types of thinking.  As a result of Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning work, we learned that the left hemisphere reasoned sequentially excelled at analysis, and handled words.  The right hemisphere reasoned holistically, recognized patterns, and interpreted emotions and non-verbal expressions.

In Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, he describes how left-brain thinking has dominated the growth of organizations since the Industrial Revolution. During most of that period, organizations focused on making everything logical. Consequently, many people are employed to perform tasks that are readily automated or capable of being transferred to lower-cost economies.

In 1990, Peter Senge’s seminal work The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Senge describes his foundational discipline – Systems Thinking.

In his article, Whole Brain Approach for Business Success, Stephen Hager, one of the founders of Brain Pathways, states, “that systems thinking can be viewed as an integrated whole brain approach to describe, analyze, and solve business problems;  build and leverage organizational core competencies; conduct strategic planning sessions, and implement scenario simulations”.

There are barriers in the hardwiring of our minds.

According to an article first published by Hara Estroff Marano in 2003 and reviewed in 2018, our brains are simply built with a “negative bias” with a greater sensitivity to unpleasant news.  The brain is so automatic that negative bias can be detected at the earliest stages of the brain’s information processing.  For a multitude of reasons including biology and chemistry, we’re more likely to register an insult or negative event than we are to take in a compliment or recall details of a happy event.

While it takes small frequent positive experiences to tip the scales toward happiness not only do negative events and experiences imprint more quickly, but they also linger longer than positive ones according to Randy Larsen, PhD The Negativity Bias: Why the Bad Stuff Sticks and How to Overcome It. Moreover, psychologist Rick Hansen PhD, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, claims that negative emotions rouse the amygdala, the almond-shaped brain structure.  Hansen calls the negative bias the “alarm bell of your brain”. According to Dr. Hansen, the amygdala “uses about two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news.  Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences, need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage.

How can we overcome negativity bias? Here are some amazing resources on the subject:  Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, and Brian Tracy.  In his article, The Power of the Subconscious Mind Joseph Murphy helps us understand and become aware that the power of the subconscious mind goes further than we might think.

 

There are 17.2 million family businesses with fewer than 100 employees.  Simply Successful is one of the first small business consulting companies to utilize the principles of Whole Brain Leadership to solve the business problems of its clients.

 

Whole Brain Leadership is a standardized ‘systems thinking’ mindset.

Companies that implement Whole Brain Leadership systems of management and leadership principles have shown to be highly productive and able to build and sustain business growth.

Simply Successful Whole Brain Leadership is a series of best practices that lay the foundation for family businesses to implement Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Discover how to Master your Mind, Emotions, and behaviors to create an accountability culture.

Using uniform tools and experienced resources, we systematically establish the Habit of Excellence raising the performance bar by standardizing how family business owners lead, manage, and set goals.

Whole Brain Leaders are aware that Complacency is the Enemy of Excellence. Communication gaps can lead to dysfunctional inattention to results, avoidance of accountability, lack of commitment, fear of conflict, and lack of trust.

Whole Brain Leaders can first establish awareness through training and then develop new behaviors as a result of personal self-development programs

Whole Brain supervisors learn how to adapt, improve competencies, and attain results with a goal-driven mindset.

Whole Brain leaders create a model and cascade the desired behaviors of a successful self-managed culture.

Organizational structure encompasses a list of the various positions, titles, and duties of a business, and the reporting structure or chain of command among them. When company leaders develop plans for how their company should function or would perform better, they undertake the business of organizational design.

Our conscious mind commands and our subconscious mind obeys! Our subconscious mind causes us to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever we attempt to do anything new or different or attempt to change any of our established patterns of behavior.  The sense of fear and discomfort are psychological signs that our subconscious has been activated.  But it has been working to establish those behavioral patterns in the background long before we will ever notice such feelings.

We can feel our subconscious minds pulling us back toward our comfort zone each time we try something new.  Even thinking about doing something different from what we are accustomed to will make us feel tense and uneasy.

For us to grow, to get out of our comfort zones, we have to be willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable doing new things the first few times.  If it is worth doing well, it’s worth doing it poorly until we get a feel for it.

All our habits of thinking and acting are stored in our subconscious mind. It has memorized all of our comfort zones and it works to keep us in them.

Successful men and women are always stretching themselves, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. Complacency is the great enemy of creativity and future possibilities.  By always working on personal self-development we anticipate and overcome how quickly the comfort zone, in any area, becomes a rut.

 

The more in tune with our subconscious mind we become, the closer we will be to breaking through the barriers to achieving our full potential and living a fulfilled happy life!