If you’ve ever felt that the world is racing ahead of you, that the challenges just keep coming and there seems to be a new disruption around every corner, you’re not alone. In fact, it is well recognised by scientists that the pace of development of our human brains lags a long way behind today’s huge pace of change in technology, not to mention the pace of social change that is coming with that technology.
Neuroscientists have understood this for a long time, though it is taking the rest of us a while to catch on. These experts understand that when we get frazzled by too much coming at us, we tend to blame ourselves unfairly, on the assumption that our poor old brains should be able to cope. But they’re not designed that way.
We need to be fairer on ourselves. When we find ourselves floundering or frazzled, we need to remind ourselves: ‘It’s not me. It’s just my brain.’
Once we understand this we can start to work with the brain, rather than against it, and from there we can work towards getting ourselves into the area known as ‘flow’. That will in turn help us deal with disruption more effectively.
Gayle has written about flow before – we also refer to it as ‘presence’ while sportspeople call it being ‘in the zone’. It’s a concept that was given prominence by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and refers to an optimum mental state in which a person is just stimulated enough to be highly focused and in control. It’s an example of the so-called ‘Goldilocks principle’ in which a person is under just the right amount of stress – neither too little to be motivated and so floundering, nor too much to be overwhelmed and frazzled.
When we are in a state of flow, we are in a better able to operate ‘above the line’, though this also works the other way: when we are above the line we are less likely to act instinctively when confronted with a challenge, more likely to draw on our inner observer and deal with disruption in a rational and measured way.
The good news is that our brain does have a natural braking mechanism that, if learn how to use it effectively and work to strengthen it, can give us a much improved ability to deal with the unexpected and rapid disruption that is part of the modern leader’s life.
In their book You Are Not Your Brain, psychiatrists Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding outline four steps – 4 ‘R’s – that can contribute to this strengthening: relabel, reframe, refocus and revalue.
I don’t have space to go into all of these here, but if we think about the first one, ‘relabel’, you’ll get a sense of how simple but powerful these concepts are. Relabelling is akin to the notion of ‘name it to tame it’. In other words, as soon as you can label a feeling or emotion, you have a chance to shift the processing of that emotion from the reactive part of the brain to the rational part of the brain. This in turn helps you shift from automatic, below-the-line response to a more productive above-the-line response.
The bottom line here is that we don’t need to accept feelings of overwhelm and being out of control as ‘costs of doing business’ in the 21st century. With a better understanding of the brain and both its power and limitations, we can learn to deal with the inevitable disruptions we will face and bounce back from the most challenging times.
Mary Maddock
Mary is facilitating the second of our Global Collaborations workshops for 2017 later this month. In ‘Working in Disruptive Times’, Mary will provide a practical introduction to the fascinating and often counterintuitive lessons of neuroscience and how these lessons can be used to better manage stress. For more information and to reserve your place, visit this page on our website.
