Brain Relationships

This month in the US we celebrated Valentine’s Day and I started thinking about a book I read recently: The Brain in Love by Daniel Amen, MD.  Amen’s book focuses on what happens to the brain when we’re in love and the importance of sex and relationships for healthy brain functioning. There is also information and advice that is relevant to us when we're at work. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), which I’ve mentioned before, is the executive functioning center of the brain. It helps us to organize and plan, to make judgments and decisions, and to control our impulses and learn from our mistakes. When it’s working right, Amen says, “we are thoughtful, empathic, expressive, organized, and goal oriented.”  He calls it “the Jiminy Cricket part of the brain that houses our conscience and our ability to stay on track toward our goals.”  So when it’s not working as well as it should, it can cause us to make poor decisions, be impulsive, disorganized, lack insight, be easily distracted, and have poor time management skills. What I really appreciated about his book is that Amen gives practical advice for creating better working brains. He points out that poor functioning in the PFC can be related to a deficiency in dopamine, a key neurotransmitter, which can be increased with medication or supplements. Other methods he offers include eating a higher protein diet, aerobic exercise, engagement in stimulating activities, using exercises and tools that help in planning and goal setting, and coaching — getting the help from someone who can hold you accountable and keep you on track and who can help you reflect on and pay more attention to your core values as well as your goals. Having a healthy PFC will enable you to develop the relationships you need at work because with a healthy PFC you will be able to listen more thoughtfully to others, focus your conversations, and think before you speak, so that what you say supports the achievement of goals while constructively expressing your feelings and empathizing with others.

Mindfulness & Tension

There are numerous models of leadership and they tend to say the same things in slightly different ways. I just read about the leadership model framed by Gordon Spence, PhD, and Michael Cavanaugh, PhD, from the University of Sydney, and their model struck me in a number of ways. In my model, I talk about self-awareness (Self), understanding and communicating with others (Others), and business knowledge (Business) as the key domains of leadership. They talk about awareness as mindfulness that is a combination of having a combined perspective of self, others and the system. Similar to my model, they talk about self-awareness leading to self-regulation (an aspect of emotional intelligence), and they point out that self-awareness and self-regulation lead to “moments of choice.” They stress that in their choice-making, effective leaders must not only embrace and understand complexity, but must also embrace tension and paradox. Mindfulness, they point out, enables engaging rather than reacting to tension and that engagement enables new perspectives to emerge. Effective leaders, they say, are comfortable with the tension that builds bridges and the ambiguity that comes from diverse perspectives. Leadership calls for “being comfortable with discomfort,” which is why effective leadership is so difficult.

Happy New Year!

It’s well into January, but Happy New Year! You can see how well I’m doing with my resolution to write every week, but Tuesday’s election prompted me to stop procrastinating. Back in November, I wrote about the race for the Senate seat in Massachusetts, and as you know by now, Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, lost to a relatively unknown state senator, Scott Brown. At the time, I wrote about Coakley’s uncompromising stand on the healthcare bill and questioned whether it was a wise move on her part. As it turns out she flip-flopped on her position and proceeded to make a series of poor judgments about the way she ran her campaign. Pundits are saying voters are angry and don’t want healthcare reform. I’m not sure I agree with their analysis, since we already have healthcare reform in Massachusetts. But, unfortunately, the outcome is that Coakley didn’t demonstrate the kind of leadership that's needed in campaigning. Now we have a Republican male leader. He has posed naked (I’m not against that but can you imagine a woman winning if she did that?) and boasts about driving a truck. What he’s shown so far is that he knows how to rev the crowd.

Managing Your Brain

The week before Thanksgiving I presented at the Healthcare Business Women’s Association Annual Conference in San Francisco on the topic of Neuroleadership. I’m been learning about this fascinating field for the past three years. Knowing how our brains work can help us develop our emotional intelligence (EQ). One part of EQ is knowing how to control your own emotions.

So here’s a very quick and very basic lesson on the brain. The prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the brain, is the executive center or decision-making part of the brain. It’s the most recently evolved part of the brain. The amygdala is the emotional fear center of the brain located deep within the brain and is an ancient, older part of the brain. It sends warning signals about danger (either real or imagined) out to the rest of the brain and starts the chain reaction for getting us ready to defend ourselves in some way. The problem is when the amygdala fires it flushes the rational prefrontal cortex with arousal chemicals and we literally experience “brain freeze” — you know that feeling when you can’t think of what to do or say. Well, it’s because you really can’t. The logical, reasoning part of you has been hampered. The original purpose of the amygdala is protection, but we have to be careful about how we respond to its signals and make sure that we don’t react in someway that might not really be helpful or constructive.

With science now telling us more about how the brain works, we are finding out how to manage our brains and our behavior better. But good management takes practice. With regard to the amygdala, here are several suggestions for managing its impact. First, you must become aware of being triggered so you can say “no” to how you might otherwise have responded and substitute a different and more appropriate behavior. Therefore, you must be highly observant of yourself. And you must have a supply of familiar mind/body techniques or healthy behaviors that you want to use in that split second you have to respond. Second, with lots of practice, particular behaviors can become the automatic response to the amygdala (which is basically what training in the military does since the danger is generally real and present and calls for the right automatic response). Third, you can be more proactive and practice mind/body techniques to keep you generally more calm and centered.

I’ll continue providing quick peeks into the brain in these short blogs and future newsletters. For more about the brain and neuroleadership, see past issues of my newsletters at my website: www.columbiaconsult.com/newsletters-ginny-obrien.html.

Thankfulness

Since it’s the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, I have to write about the role of being thankful in leadership. Leaders need to demonstrate how much they appreciate their followers. In the workplace, that translates into showing gratitude to your direct reports for their hard work and performance. Brain research shows that people want to be treated with respect and fairness and will respond positively to sincere positive reinforcement. Showing your employees and team members that you value them and their efforts reinforces their motivation and loyalty. Your demonstration of thanks through recognition and appreciation creates a reinforcing loop that leads to higher performance and happier people. So thank your people this week, but make sure you mean it!

Humility or Arrogance?

I consider humility a characteristic of leadership that reflects emotional intelligence. Balancing humility with confidence moves a leader away from arrogance towards inclusion and sharing the ownership of success. My political leanings are generally left of center and I voted for President Obama because I saw him as the kind of collaborative leader that we needed to reposition the perception of the US around the world. Recently, however, I read a column by a political conservative about the president that raised questions for me. This conservative writer claimed Obama’s language has shifted from “we” to “I” and he pointed out the dangers inherent in that shift. Without more research, I can’t refute at the moment whether Obama’s language is now “I” centered or not. But the language leaders use is critically important and they must pay attention to how they speak about success, because their language can reveal whether they are acting from a place of arrogance or humility.

Principles or Compromise?

Here in Massachusetts, as everyone knows, we lost our senior senator, Ted Kennedy. And now there’s a race to fill his seat. One of those running is our female attorney general, Martha Coakley, who has a strong following among Democratic women. But Coakley just took a stand that could jeopardize her position as a front runner: she said she wouldn’t vote for health care bill approved by the House last Saturday because it restricts federal funding for abortion. I happen to be a strong advocate for choice and was disappointed but not surprised to see that provision in the health care bill and thought it was a compromise that probably had to be made. Coakley’s stand surprised me and it raised a key leadership question. In the long run, what is wiser: holding to your principles or compromising in order to move forward? I’ll be interested to see how the answer unfolds.