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.