Using your “Thinky Meats” - Sage and Saboteur brain modes
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One of my friends describes the human brain as “thinky meats.” That’s not too far off, really! We use this roughly 3-pound, finely-developed chunk of “thinky meat” all the time, for interpreting what we take in through our senses, for deciding what is and is not true, for solving problems and reaching goals, and for feeling emotions and connecting with other people.
What you think about strengthens your neural connections to that thing. You quite literally shape your brain to get more of what you put attention to. This is called neuroplasticity. (And it is way more complex than this, but I’m simplifying.) Your brain can be your best friend and your worst enemy. You can use your brain to gain great insight, to harness flashes of creativity, to know what is truly important, to experience joy and love and positive emotions, and to guide yourself to take clear, laser-focused action to make things happen. But you are also likely held back by self-sabotaging thoughts and emotions like harsh, critical judgment of self and others, by feelings of stress and anxiety, by the fear of not fitting in or of failure, or simply being distracted by too many things that all seem important at the time. Friend or enemy in your thinky meats depends on how you decide to use them and which parts of the brain you keep activated most of the time. From the research into how our brains are “wired,” we know that positive and negative thoughts and emotions come from entirely different regions of the brain. You have two very different regions in your brain: The Thrive Region, which I refer to as the “Sage,” and the Survive Region, which contains your inner “Saboteurs.” Both parts of the brain are necessary. But the survival region is only needed a very small fraction of the time to alert us to danger. Unfortunately, many of us live most of our lives with that region turned on, sabotaging our performance, relationships, and wellbeing. The fundamental problem is that the prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain responsible for self-control, willpower, creativity) goes offline when we are stressed, fearful, or anxious. We lose access to our strongest and most resilient selves. Fortunately, we can learn to change our brain activation from the Saboteur survival brain (survival, fear-driven, negative emotions) to the more effective Sage brain (clear, calm, positive emotions). We do this with a relatively simple process:
As a Positive Intelligence® (PQ) Coach I use this process to help people build their mental fitness. Mental fitness is the capacity to respond to life’s challenges with a positive rather than a negative mindset. Just like training for physical fitness, training for mental fitness takes time, proper form, and repetition. You are literally rewiring your brain through exercise for more access to positive thoughts and emotions. Typically, people will master the basics and see excellent results in about 6 weeks. They are then able to apply these skills and techniques to all sorts of challenges within about 12 weeks. With just a few minutes of app-based exercise a day people can build this into a lifelong habit. I’ve been working with this since before 2010, when two professional friends of mine, Rich Trafton and Diane Marentette, wrote a book called “A New Brain for Business” that summarized brain research as it applied to organizational leadership. About that time, Shirzad Chamine and his colleagues were also pulling together research from neuroscience, cognitive behavioral psychology, positive psychology, and performance science into what Shirzad labelled “Positive Intelligence.” I was working with the same principles in 2015 and started using Positive Intelligence as a comprehensive system in 2022. This explains a lot of why we think, act, and feel as we do—both the good and the bad parts. It also shows us that we can make choices about how to handle the challenges we face. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist and Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, wrote in his acclaimed book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” that sometimes all we can control is how we choose to react to what happens to us. But we always have that choice. Since we have a choice, why not choose the perspective that will make us both happy and effective? The “how” of activating the Sage and letting the Saboteur survival brain response fade is core to the Positive Intelligence method. I strongly recommend it for everyone. When you see me referring to Sage or Saboteur, this is what I’m talking about. I am not doing individual business and leadership coaching now, but I am still working with people as a mental fitness trainer and PQ Coach. If you’d like to learn more about how this works, check out the PQ Starter Guide (https://stevesemler.kit.com/pqstarterguide). I hope you choose to have a good day by using your “Thinky Meats” to power up your Sage brain. You deserve it! All the best, |
