Understand Your Brain To Shift Your Perspective And Relieve Stress

I know you have wonderful intentions. I know you wanted to come back from the holiday break re-energized and ready for a new year, full of new thinking, new ideas and hope for productive collaboration with your team and colleagues. That's the best way of approaching a New Year—to bring forward optimism, gratitude, and encouragement for yourself and others.

But the reality is that you may not know how to bring anything like this. You are more likely to be run by your habitual thinking patterns, your moods and emotions, your fears and concerns. So many of us are living in stress. Covid-19 continues to plague us, we continue to navigate difficult social and racial justice issues, our political process can be infuriating, many of us remain reluctant home-school teachers, we turn on the news and see the present-day impact of climate change, and the list goes on.

How do you shift all of that to create a brighter outcome? Leadership, after all, is the act of creation. Of making something from nothing. Of moving toward a future that hasn't yet arrived.

What the Best Leaders Can Teach Us

The best leaders I have worked with as an executive coach are unflappable. As David Rock, author of "Your Brain at Work," says, "They can observe their own thinking, and thus can change how they think. These people have better cognitive control and thus can access a quieter mind on demand."

From my own observations, that means they can keep their feet on the ground while still opening their hearts and minds toward the future. They recover quickly from personal and professional difficulties. They certainly don't let their mood dominate the day. They are more curious than certain. And even though they very much personally care, they don't seem to take difficult feedback or events personally.

In many ways, I've learned more from these clients than they may have realized. I witnessed them receive heartbreaking news, a foundational change in strategy that impacted their entire team, betrayal by a colleague, a key team member resignation, or the closure of a beloved product line. And I watched them bounce back in remarkable time. The truth is, I wanted to learn how to do what they did.

How Your Brain Affects The Way You Lead

To further understand my stellar CEO clients and what kind of magic they employed to remain so steady and stable in the face of crushing events, I turned to the field of neuro-leadership and the pioneering work of Rock, who explains, "Understanding your brain increases your effectiveness at work. This happens because with knowledge of your brain, you make different decisions moment to moment."

Let's take a minute to talk about your brain. Well, three of them, actually.

The Reptilian brain is the oldest part of your brain and sits just at the brainstem at the top of your spine in the base of your skull. It has three simple responses: fight, flight or freeze. It is highly reactive to the environment and what seems to be a threat. But it also blocks your ability to plan and create.

When you're living in fear and stress, you're living in survival. And when you're in survival, you are operating with the reptilian brain. What does it mean for you as a leader or partner or parent or citizen if you're leading with this old brain? You will most likely react to your environment in rather primitive ways. You'll be focused on reducing threats (whether real or perceived) to you and your team.

The Limbic brain , also called the emotional or feeling brain, connects emotions to experiences. It also creates long-term memories. You remember events, in large part, due to the emotions you felt during them.

The limbic brain manufactures and releases chemicals in the form of peptides. This chemical cocktail has a specific signature that reflects the emotions you are experiencing in the moment. Emotions signal the body to record the event chemically.

The Neocortex is the newest and most evolved part of your brain. The human brain reached its present-day level of evolutionary complexity 250,000 to 300,000 years ago. At that time, our ancestors experienced a 20% increase in the mass of the thinking, reasoning areas of the human brain. You got a bigger brain. You're welcome.

Dr. Joe Dispenza , author of "Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind," writes, "The seat of our conscious awareness, the neocortex houses our free will, our thinking, and our capacity to learn, reason and rationalize."

With the neocortex comes all kinds of goodies. We can calm ourselves down. We can discern friend from foe. We can catch ourselves and change. We can learn and integrate new ideas. We can talk ourselves out of irrational responses.

Sounds good, right? So let's look at what can you do to start this new year off using your neocortex.

Kicking Your Rational Brain into Gear

Here are two things you can use right away to regain calm no matter what's going on around (or within) you:

1. Label emotions. I often say, "name it to tame it." This can move you out of the emotion and engage the neocortex, the rational, thinking part of the brain.

Labeling—either verbally or in writing—can create calm in your body and mind, and from this calmer state, you will be able to see more opportunity, solutions, and paths forward. In his book "Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation," Daniel Siegel explains, "Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being."

Task yourself with labeling or naming your emotions throughout your day, telling yourself the truth as you experience it: "bored," "frustrated," "disappointed." It can help shift you out of a negative emotional state.

2. Challenge your perspective: The best CEOs I've coached can look at circumstances through a variety of lenses. In other words, they can shift perspectives with ease. In this way, they keep an open mind and can be influenced by others who held a different perspective. They do not embrace certainty and often enter the uncomfortable place of not knowing.  They are curious, open learners.

You can challenge your perspective by simply setting down the story you have been telling yourself about a situation.  Or making up a new, more empowering story.  Or, if you are brave, you can challenge your perspective by inviting others into conversation and dialogue. Tell them how you are seeing things and ask them to shoot holes in your thinking.  Invite dissent.

Both of these strategies or tools may seem simple enough, but I encourage you to take them on as a practice for a day, a week, a month or even a year if you can maintain that kind of focus. Make it your practice to shift your thinking through labeling and perspective shifting. You, your brain and your leadership will be better for it.