Our amazing minds are out of date!
The human brain is the most complex organism in the known universe, and yet the way it is wired is a millennium out of date! It is the one thing that we all have in common, regardless of culture and experiences. It’s design and habits influence the choices we makes in various situations and these decisions ultimately impact on the success of our performance every day.
It is designed to give us a survival edge when we come across a rampant lion or bear – rather than to survive the rather challenging person we dance around each day.
This means that the way our brain functions are still catching up on the way we need to best manage our stress. And what about that mental chatter! This can prompt me to do daft things in the heat of the moment – and then later I respond with the familiar question: ‘How on earth could I say that? What was I thinking!’
Today, advances in technology are accelerating the BrainSmart Revolution, helping us up-date our brain design to meet the real needs of life in the 21 century. So far, we have thrown out some old myths about the way we think and respond to our world, such as, we now know that our brains are amazingly plastic throughout our lives, promoting Smart Thinking at any age.
Today, research shows us that the way to update an old habit effectively is to focus on building a new one to replace it, rather than to focus mental energy on what we want to eliminate. Hebbs Law tells us that what we our focus attention on strengthens a habit – our neural networks that ‘fire together, wire together.’
Navigating Setbacks MYndfully
My own setbacks over the past three decades have pushed me to up-skill my coping strategies so I could meet each new challenge. To do this, I had to update my mental models and navigation tools so they were aligned with the current realities of each challenge. I explored the best research, models and workouts available at the time, to help me to stretch to meet new needs and prepare me for the new opportunities.
My earliest harsh setback occurred when my child suffered injury in a car accident. This led me to the workings of the emotional brain, based on Joseph Le Doux’s neuroscience research.
At the time, I was a teacher and, with the help of Pippa Stein of WITS, we developed new ways for people to draw on previously untapped potential as they stretched for new goals.
This process helped them to achieve new levels of success that people were mostly able to sustain for up to two years, that is, until new skills were needed to progress to the next level.
Over the last two decades, I continued to update this process, aligning and modifying the process based on the latest groundbreaking research today.
We’ve all had our own harsh life experiences and their are times when we need to stretch outside ourselves to reclaim our resilience and balance. My own life setbacks led me to seek out research on promoting new levels of imaginative resilience and smart thinking, especially in difficult situations. I continue to add these findings to the THORT Tools, using the latest BrainSmart approaches to promoting resilience, effective risk-taking accompanied by good decision-making in challenging situations.
This led to the THORT Self-Coaching System. Each time I designed a key set of self-coaching tools to guide me, or a client towards smarter thinking and habits in context, I then shared them with friends and clients. This revealed which approaches had the most immediate impact, and in what sort of situation they were most effective – or not. It also helped me find the quickest way to move someone forwards, helping them to let go of their constraints and instead move towards taking effective actions in their world.
The Reward for Neurocoaching!
Recently a CIMA lecturer sent a very eloquent and knowledgeable women to see me, whom I will call Edna. She had failed the global, final qualifying exam 5 times, and nothing she, or the lecturers, could do changed the final result.
Edna saw me for a combined BrainSmart assessment and coaching session, and finally left elated. She said she now could see what she needed to do differently to succeed.
And she did! We had just one further online call while I was overseas, to help her maintain focus and confidence, and she passed at her next sitting!
The sad thing is that Edna and many others have to stumble so often, before the reach out to find the support and mental clarity that allows them to move forward.
Edna has offered to work with me on a BrainSmart Resilience project for women in Africa, supporting the 30% club global initiative, to help others like her move on upward in their careers.
Change yourself as your world changes
The BrainSmart self-coaching THORT system makes self-coaching through a current dilemma more easily accessible. It is comprehensive and helps build resilience through mindful awareness and smart thinking. It partners you, helping you to move forward from a setback and then helps to keep you on track by making better choices that led to new effective action.
My work and thinking has been strongly influenced by Jung’s view on the ways we choose to live in our world. He advised us to reflect the new realities and experiences inherent in the changes brought about in our current time, and then adapt our language, forms and symbols used to describe our new reality so that they ‘fit’.
I do this by translating groundbreaking neuroscience – mainly from the last 5 to 10 years – into a central metaphor of an Egyptian Dhow. This simply illustrates the two integrated neural systems underlying neuroscience familiar, meaningful and memorable so we can all draw on it when we are anxious or feeling overwhelmed.
This is then developed into focused workouts, models and tools, which together, express a simple coherent world. Making our Mind/Brain/Body connections become visible in a Smart and Basic Brain System, helps us to build mindful awareness of ourselves and others in new challenging situation.