Only a select few can successfully “talk at” others, relying on their charm and storytelling prowess to captivate their audience. However, the majority of us lack such innate abilities, yet we often find ourselves constantly talking at others instead of engaging in meaningful conversations by asking questions and actively listening. True active listening means dedicating genuine attention, not merely waiting for the other person to pause so that we can interject with our own thoughts. Regrettably, this skill of truly listening eludes many of us.
Not knowing how to listen is doing massive damage in organisations: “Not being really listened to by my manager/s” is one of the most common complaints we hear from the people and teams we work with. This is no trite matter. The extent of this is losing people to absenteeism, and more long-term losing them forever to other organisations. When it takes on average 25,000 euro to recruit and train a new person, it is quite incredible to think that we are losing this money spent over something as humanly basic as listening, don’t you think?’
You may be thinking to yourself that the people who say they are not being listened to are just playing the victim, but we see it with our own eyes all the time. People think they are listening to others, but in actual fact they are not!
Research in neuroscience (Spunt, 2013), indicates the presence of two large-scale systems in the human brain that play a major role in successful listening: the putative mirror neuron system, which likely facilitates the relatively automatic perception of the how of speech (i.e., how it is being said); and the so-called mentalizing system, which likely underlies our ability to actively reach conclusions about the why (i.e., why it is being said) of speech behavior. The dynamic interaction of mirroring and mentalizing processes may be pivotal for successful listening and social interaction more generally. Often managers are more focused on the tasks that must be achieved, thinking about their next meeting or worrying about something they can do nothing about, than fully engaging these systems.
Neuroscience has confirmed what we have always known, that there is an important difference between hearing and listening. Neuroscientist Seth Horowitz: “While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognise it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.” Horowitz says hearing has evolved as a more essential tool for survival than sight. So we have no excuse. We have the hardware , we just don’t have the focus and we don’t take the time.
However, we humans are not totally at fault. Some would argue that the technological age we live in, where we are constantly looking at screens (computers, iPads, texting on phones) is etching away at our ability to listen. Horowitz says ‘The modern world of sound—and more often, noise—is being overrun by digital distraction and information overload’.
Many managers wonder why their teams aren’t as productive as they might be. In our experience, we see time and time again that when managing performance, as with much of the interacting we do in life, people often “wait to speak” rather than listening attentively and actively. Yet listening tunes our brain to the patterns of our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the nonvisual parts of our world feeds into everything. Our reactions to what we hear are less processed and more instinctive than our reactions to what we see.’ Horowitz describes the auditory sense as the human “alarm system” that operates constantly, even while asleep.
If we truly listen, we can tune into what might be holding a team member back, that small nudge that someone needs to help push them over the finishing line. Ask questions, and listen to the variation in people’s words, and their tone of voice NOW instead of waiting until they are shouting for attention or worse still, they’ve left the building, and you’ll never hear their voice again!
I have managers coming to me for coaching quite regularly, telling me they want to develop their charisma, so that they will be in the running for a position opening up for VP, director or partner. They seem to think there is a potion I can give to them that will make their charisma magically grow.
Oh how wonderful it would be if I could create this potion. We could all swallow it and become as charismatic and as influential as JFK, Oprah, Obama, Princess Diana, Gandhi, Reagan, Clinton (insert your favorite here). Love them or hate them, they’ve got charisma! And like all of us, none of them are, or were perfect!
Can you think of a charismatic person you know or have met? What was it about them that made them charismatic in your opinion? Did they talk endlessly about themselves with unbridled enthusiasm and confidence? Or was it a two-way conversation where they engaged by asking questions, showing genuine interest in your responses, and spoke about themselves only when they had information, a fact, a story, or an experience that could be of assistance or interest to you?
(If you don’t want to read this article but would like to see 2 new jokes I learnt today, skip to the end)
What most people in search of charisma don’t realise is that research shows us that charismatic people are those that display not only confidence, but consideration and empathy. They are people who offer social support to others, and are trustworthy. In organisations, they are the people who have close interaction and exchange with the people on their teams, and who build strong social networks.
Charisma and Leadership are often seen going hand in hand. Have you heard of transformational leadership? Transformational leaders are those leaders able to inspire their followers to accomplish great things i.e. to move their followers to a high level of performance by affective and inspirational engagement through idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. To do this, they are required to be mindful of the needs and motivations of others, facilitate complex interactions in group dynamics and steer their employees forward in the course of their managerial/decision-making responsibilities.
Research finds that transformational leaders are regarded as charismatic. These leaders do the following:
• Display consideration and empathy
• Possess mature moral development
• Have close interaction and exchange with their people
• Build strong social networks within their organisations
• Offer social support to the individuals and teams they manage
Effective leaders are transformational and charismatic. Those who display traits listed above exhibit high standards of performance and ethics and are deeply trusted and respected by their followers. Because of that people identify with and want to emulate them. Would you like people to identify with and emulate you?
Interestingly, a meta-analysis of trust and effective leadership has shown that when leaders are perceived as trustworthy, this translates into perceived organizational trustworthiness and results in positive employee and organizational outcomes (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002) such as higher organisational citizenship behaviors (Krosgaard, Brodt, & Whitener, 2002).
By the way, charisma isn’t the same thing as confidence, but appearing confident can make you more charismatic because your confidence will put others at ease and inspire faith in your abilities. If people see you as a confident person, they will naturally want to be around you.
There is no magic potion, funny that!. Charisma is not about being an extrovert or about pretending to care about other people. It’s about genuinely liking other people. The emotional component of that is really hard to fake! But when you have it, other people feel important. Furthermore, if you don’t have it now but are willing to start practicing the true traits of charismatic people, you will even end up enjoying yourself more, regardless of who you are with!
Some charismatic people tell jokes!
Two snowmen are standing in a field. One says to the other: “Funny, I smell carrots too”.
That didn’t make you laugh…Ok try this:
A magician was driving down the road, then he turned into a drive way…
You probably already know that our damaging or destructive habits (for example in how we treat our bodies, in how we communicate with others) are linked with deep fears, which developed in the early years of our lives.
A few examples:
1) If a child is made to feel they are not good enough, they often stop making any effort to please and then in adulthood this might show up as lacking in motivation. Alternatively, it may develop into a need to over-achieve in their career to the detriment of other areas in life.
2) If as a child, we have been told that life is difficult, then we start filtering for examples of this and as adults we expect life to be difficult and so everything becomes an overwhelming challenge.
3) Often people who have been emotionally abused as children, then over-eat to protect themselves as adults.
Powerful techniques are often required to break limiting beliefs & destructive habits, which most of us have about ourselves, but which express themselves in a whole range of ways.
Erika Brodnock, is here again to share how she conquered her challenge in forming new habits…
Erika: I was determined not to give up on my quest to see the pictures in my mind, in order to visualise the version of me I wanted to exist. I asked everyone I could what to do to see more clearly and refused to pretend I could see when I couldn’t (to the despair of many a trainer)!
Two things worked for me. Firstly, I was advised to use EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and ‘tap’ on the fact that I couldn’t see and all of the frustration that accompanied that. EFT is like acupuncture without needles and involves tapping on the same meridian points needles are inserted into for acupuncture. The results are similar to those of acupuncture too. Energy blockages clear and energy is once again able to flow, providing relief from aches, pains, long-term ailments, stress and much more.
The work I did with EFT was profound and lead to an understanding that as a child I had witnessed something dangerous, but I had not seen it. I then unconsciously blamed myself for not seeing and had carried this anger and fear in to adulthood . While I carried that anger with myself I shut down my capacity to see. My eyesight quickly physically deteriorated and while I believe I managed to fix that by having laser eye surgery in my early twenties, my ability to ‘see’ was still impaired.
Letting go of the associated anger saw me become able to picture a small white box in the pitch black I saw every time I closed my eyes.
The second step was the process of using my strongest sense (sound for me) to talk myself through the picture that I wanted to create. So I would say ‘I can see the sea’ and the sea would appear. I would then say ‘I can see me’, describe what I was wearing, how I looked inside my head until the picture appeared exactly as I wished it to be.
If your strongest sense is feeling, then feeling your way to the picture with various sensations has worked effectively for clients of mine too.
As with every learned skill, practice made perfect, and the more I spoke the pictures into my mind’s eye, the quicker they began to appear. After a few months I was able to close my eyes and see a picture as I wanted it to appear. without needing to spend 10 minutes talking to myself to get it there. Now I’m proud to say at the coaching and staff training courses I deliver that I can visualise with ease, and have the tools to help anyone who needs to see what’s right before their very eyes.
For more information on EFT, you can visit www.karismakidz.co.uk where I’ve taken to teaching these essential skills to children at the earliest possible age.
Imagine if you could implement this type of teaching into staff training, regardless of the topic being covered and get everyone to commit to this every day with reference to the habit they are trying to change or the new thing they are learning in the staff training. Imagine the speed of progress? These are just examples of one small technique we now teach individuals and groups we work with at adaptas™ to speed up the neural connections for real and long-lasting change.
Erika Brodnock is one of our associates at Adaptas™. Erika is an energy psychologist, specialising in cutting-edge techniques that embrace Quantum Physics, Epigenetics, Noetic Science and Energy. She is qualifed as an EFT Master Practitioner and Trainer (AAMET), NLP Master Practitioner and Coach (ABNLP), Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner, Psych –K advanced facilitator and is an accredited Heartmath provider of workshops and training. She is also the CEO and Founder of The Centre for Positive Children Ltd.
In previous blog posts, we have extensively discussed the influential role of visualisation in acquiring new skills and cultivating beneficial habits while replacing old ones. Many accomplished individuals now employ techniques long embraced by successful athletes to enhance performance, motivation, and focus. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that not everyone possesses a natural talent for visualisation, making the process of creating lasting, meaningful change in both personal life and the workplace more demanding for some individuals than others.
As far back as 1932, Bartlett (One of the 1st psychologists to relate memory performance to peoples learning strategies) found that he could classify his research participants on the basis of their informal comments as ‘visualisers’ who claimed to rely mainly upon visual imagery in remembering, or as ‘vocalisers’, who claimed to rely mainly upon language cues rather than mental images. Vocalisers tended to be less confident in their recall. Bartlett regarded this distinction between ‘visualisers’ and ‘vocalisers’ to reflect a relatively stable characteristic of individuals or in other words a dimension of cognitive style.
One of our associates, Erika Brodnock, is here to share the challenges she had in making the changes she wanted because of this distinction that Bartlett noticed so long ago…
Erika: Our conscious, subconscious and super conscious minds are constantly working together to keep us acting in a way we know to be true to ourselves. This understanding is the first step toward lasting change – getting an awareness of who we are, what we do, our needs, triggers and the person we want to become will enable us to make even the changes we believed were impossible.
The awareness of who we are now, what we do, our needs and our triggers are important, as with this awareness we can self correct and make more conscious decisions to think, do and be ‘better’. But these elements collectively are only 1 tenth as important as the ability to see the person we want to become.
According to Dr Steve Peters, author of ‘The Chimp Paradox’ and trainer to top Olympic athletes; the unconscious mind is at least 5 times the strength of the conscious mind. Peters also asserts that the unconscious does not process things logically with words and numbers. The language of our unconscious mind is sight, smell, sound, taste and feeling. Being completely sensory, the most effective mode of communication is seeing you as the person you wish to become and the things you will think do and be at that time. Hearing the sounds you will hear, feeling the way you will feel and tasting what you will taste will strengthen this communication further…
But what if you’re like I was, and whenever you close your eyes all you see is darkness (with a hint of red if there is a light source in the room)… I remember sitting in many a coaching, training and staff training course, as others described all the wonderful things they could see in their minds eye and feeling a familiar block of envy sinking from my chest to the pit of my stomach. I could see nothing, it didn’t matter how many times someone told me “We can all see, your pictures are just moving too fast” or whatever else it was they decided to say to console me. I still couldn’t see anything and the more I tried the less I saw…
Join me in coming weeks for the step-by-step account of what I did to access my visualisation skills.
Erika Brodnock is one of our associates at Adaptas™. Erika is an energy psychologist, specialising in cutting-edge techniques that embrace Quantum Physics, Epigenetics, Noetic Science and Energy. She qualifed as an EFT Master Practitioner and Trainer (AAMET), NLP Master Practitioner and Coach (ABNLP), Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner, Psych –K advanced facilitator and is an accredited Heartmath provider of workshops and training. She is also the CEO and Founder of The Centre for Positive Children Ltd.
We were working with approximately one hundred middle managers recently on the topic of employee engagement and performance management, and it hit me, how the very basics, the building blocks of optimising people’s potential are often ignored, even in the most high functioning of organisations (this is a multinational organisation).
The organisation in question exudes a wonderfully positive vibe, fostering a sense of camaraderie among its employees. It stands as an exemplary model of a goal-oriented organisation that, like any other, prioritises targets and the bottom line, yet remains firmly committed to upholding values of integrity and treating its members like family.
By the way, were you aware that interactions with coworkers and supervisors exert the most significant influence on emotions in the workplace? The positive emotional bond shared between colleagues might be the crucial factor in maintaining employee well-being at work. Many individuals express that the only ones who truly comprehend their daily job challenges are their coworkers, rather than their own families.
Did you also know that the effects of the things we often don’t like doing in the workplace, can be mitigated by feelings of solidarity in the workplace (Karabanow, 1999). This solidarity includes respect for others, feelings of belonging and family (all working towards a common goal) and an element of fun.
Anyway, back to the point…whilst working with this particular group, we realised that even in this highly functioning (e.g. positive relationships, family feel) organisation, there were signs that many opportunities for growth were being missed, solely because individuals were not prioritising substantial time for performance appraisals and were not conducting them optimally. Other tasks and meetings, leading to repetitive diary changes meant that often appraisals were months and months apart, and often when they actually happened, were being rushed, and managers were not engaging. These managers were not asking powerful questions, or truly listening to responses. All in all, they were not taking the time to practice good coaching skills at the level necessary.
In conversation with the managers during our sessions together, most agreed that realistically they just have not been in the habit of prioritising these meetings, and that they could in reality make time to do so.
I estimated that each of these managers have 3-4 people on their immediate team. Approximately 75% of them admitted that they were not prioritising appraisals with the individuals on their team, meaning new skills development in many cases were getting pushed out by approximately one year. This organisation had a revenue of almost 500 million in 2011, a profit increase of approximately 10% on 2010…pretty impressive for the times we are in, don’t you think?
My question is, how much greater could this impressive profit increase have been if managers at every level really engaged their colleagues and hence made them feel even more valued, motivated and moving forward, (and kept the organisation thriving well into the future, guaranteeing everyone’s jobs remain intact) to the extent they could be?
If you can do the maths, let me know, it’s not my strongest point 😉
In previous blogs, I have been promising we would look more at how to speed up learning new habits. We have been talking about how we can actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, in order to actually speed up the process of changing our habits!
One of the best ways to do this is to follow the steps below:
1) Decide what your new habit is going to be.
2) Sit back or lie down, making sure you are comfortable.
3) Close your eyes
4) Take 5 nice big deep breaths, breathing in through your nose, and out through your mouth. As you breath in, focus on your belly expanding and your lungs filling with air. As you breath out, feel the body softening and letting go of tension.
5) Let your breath return to its natural rhythm, in and out through your nose.
6) Scan your body from the top of your head down to your feet. Feel the contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Does it feel heavy? Where is the heaviest point of contact? Feel your hands and your feet on the floor. Allow everything to relax into the chair or floor as you scan down.
7) Get a picture in your mind of you doing the new habit. Will you be placing vegetables in to a pot as you cook a healthy meal? Will you pumping sweat and feeling energised at a gym, an exercise class, a dance class, or a climbing wall?! Will you be having comfortable warm conversations with clients that leave you and your client feeling good afterwards? Will you be asking more questions and listening more to the responses in a meeting with a colleague, because you have realised that telling people what to do is not coaching them effectively?
8) As you get that image really clear in your mind, hear the sounds you are hearing, feel the feelings you are feeling (happy, strong, enthralled, excited etc), see everything around you that would be there; the people, the weather, the building, whatever and whomever you are surrounded by.
9) As you see, hear and feel everything that goes with performing this new habit (making the image and the actions as vivid as possible), as if you are really in the situation (i.e. not watching the situation!), take as long to do the new habit in your mind as it would if you were doing it in real life.
10) Now, once you are vividly experiencing that experience, start to run it faster and faster until you feel your whole body feeling the emotions that come with having that new habit.
11) Now, as you run through the experience, imagine the neurons throughout your brain firing and connecting, just like in the image above. Imagine the neurons passing their electrical charge along to each other and see pathways being formed that represent the new habit. You could even imagine them speaking to each other as they pass the electrical charge along.
Take a look at a few seconds of this video clip to get a clearer picture of neurons communicating and to help you to imagine this happening in your own brain.
Do this exercise every day for a week, repeating the visualisation and the imagining of the experience of the event, with the neurons firing and creating pathways throughout your brain. Imagine that experience and the pathways being created 10, 15, 20 times in one sitting.
Please remember, that you have to also practice the new behaviour for real!! You have to physically cook that healthy meal, ask more questions of your colleagues or clients, or do the physical exercise!!! You need to do both the real and the imagined. Physically performing the new skill, visualising yourself performing the skill or behaviour and imagining the neural connections will work quicker and more effectively than just performing the behaviour or just thinking about it, in forming the new habit. If you want to feel healthier or have effective communication, training yourself and practicing repetitively for a few weeks will make it all stick.
Read back on previous blogs if you would like to learn more about how and why this exercise will help you to speed up a change in your habits.
A few little changes to our daily routine can make a big difference in helping our resilience and stress levels.
To listen to a recent radio interview, where Dr. Celine Mullins discusses resilience, and much more, with Mary Darby Byrne, Dublin South 93.9 Fm, click here: Everyday Resilience
(see interview timings below and/or read text of interview below if you prefer to read than to listen).
Interview Timings:
0 -.39: Introduction
.39 – 1.35: Introduction to programme on Resilience
1.36 – 3.47: How did adaptas™ come about?
3.48 – 5.24: Common things that hold people back
5.25 – 6.35: Depression
6.36 – 9.16: Resilience and the brain
9.20 – 13.38: Communication in the workplace
13.42 – 20.00: Being content in one’s job
20.01 – 25.12: Finding what you love doing and tips on being resilient regardless.
25.58 – 32.42: Where did the name adaptas™ come from, and how everyone can responsibility for their life.
Transcribed Audio:
Mary Darby Byrne: Hello and welcome to the brain train Mary Darby Byrne and today’s guest in the studio is Celine Mullins, welcome.
Dr. Celine Mullins: Hi Mary
Mary: You work on training and inspiring change.
Celine: Yes we worked with organizations and with individuals and groups around getting people to take responsibility and get awareness around the things that are holding them back and the things that might be holding them back in having a relationships that they’d like to have, with having the success that they’d like to have and getting rid of, of the things that are in the way of actually moving them forward.
Celine: Yes, we have a number of programs and everyday resilience is around kind of getting a lot of techniques into your day, every day that will actually make you feel happier, will actually get some control over what’s happening in your brain, the kinds of thoughts that your having, where your focus is going. Really, really easy techniques that you bring into every single day from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. And so getting these things and every day, because there’s a lot of people in the moment in a states of frustration, very unhappy, very stuck with everything that’s been going in the economy and you know there’s been a lot of change taking place recently and all these different techniques bring control over what’s happening in the mind and make people feel much more resilient, can actually make people feel happier, stronger and more able to deal with the moment-to-moment things that happen around us.
Mary: Okay so, what inspired you to set up adaptas in the first place?
Celine: Well my background is I’m a psychologist and I’m also an actress and a producer. Really I wanted to bring all of those things together, because I could see the strength of what I was learning as an actor and producer, bringing all those things together with the psychology and also coaching, and I have studied various other things as well. So I bring everything together and have a looked for the best ways of moving people forward, and for myself personally there’s a lot of moments in my life where I felt very, very stuck and when I started studying all of these things, say with the psychology it made me much more aware of what was going on in my own brain, and my body and where I could actually make changes myself, around the kinds of thoughts I was having, say negative thought patterns, etc and then with the acting believe it or not I used to be a very, very shy little girl and when I started acting, it totally brought me out of myself, gave me this new found confidence and suddenly I was, I was almost like I kind of went from you know the cocoon to the butterfly within a few years of starting drama and I just always could see the strength in both of this things and bringing them together, I always wanted to work with other people, to help other people and I wanted to find a way that I could work with people and so also having studied the coaching and various other areas I looked for the best techniques to help people change quickly, rather than having to be say in therapy for 5-6 years, which is sometimes what happens. Sometimes people can have very negative experiences as children which set them up badly for life and even people who’ve had very happy childhoods, there’s all sorts of things that go on; all the habits, the patterns, the biases that we develop as children are what stick with us for the rest of our lives and often the patterns we’ve developed as children although, they worked for us when we were children when we reach adulthood they’re no longer working, but we’re still in those patterns and so it’s trying to get people’s awareness around this patterns, these biases, these habits and helping them change them.
Mary: What’s what would be a common denominator you see in people, or is there?
Celine: One of the biggest things for me is a lack of awareness for people around what their habits and patterns and their biases are and how this things impact on how they feel about themselves, and how they impact on other people and how their affecting their relationships. So their family relationships, their relationships with her friends and relationships in work and so that’s one of the main things for me is helping people become more aware of the things that are getting in the way of themselves and their relationships, and so it’s back to, you know the negative thought patterns and even positive thought patterns, you know it’s all these thoughts that keep going on in your head and your repeating them over and over and over again and they might not necessarily be the right ones to actually get you to where you need to be. A thing I’ve noticed I guess in the last couple of years, in Ireland we’ve always in Ireland had a predisposition towards you know, ‘oh! Sure you know tomorrow or whatever sure it’s grand, everything’s grand’. But in the last couple of years I think it just got worse. The rates of suicide have gone up, the amount of people on antidepressants has gone up. Obviously people are feeling quite beat down and again around awareness, people have to take individual responsibility for actually making changes themselves. You can’t expect a government or a bank or church or whatever to actually make the changes to your life, you’ve actually got to take responsibility and make changes every single day yourself, if you want your life to be the way you’d like it to be.
Mary: But It’s like, I think I find it strange when people go to, if they’re feeling depressed they go to a doctor to get a tablet, as opposed to trying to find out where the depression is coming on. That’s what I have found. The strangest thing is why don’t you do detective work on yourself, find the source of it and let it go.
Celine: The thing is a lot of people think that, well first of all they don’t have the tools to go and do the detective work. Secondly they don’t have the, well we haven’t been taught in school or college or by our parents a lot of the time how to identify the tools or the techniques to even ask ourselves the questions on, on what we should be doing differently. You know in school we learned geography, history, English, all brilliant stuff, but how useful is that for us in our everyday lives as adults in actually having positive relationships. The thing is that the happiest people in the world are people you live in communities with close-knit relationships, and if we’re going through our lives not having close relationships, it’s very, very difficult for us to be happy, to be content and to be resilient.
Mary: So tell me, your everyday resilience, these are just little techniques, as such. So this is like building a Muscle.
Celine: Yes, yes the thing is that what we’ve realised over the last couple of decades with the brain is that the brain is plastic. So you can change what’s happening in the brain, you can change the neural pathways. So if you imagine you’re walking down a road and there are all sorts of paths going everywhere and you’ve got a load of brambles in the way, and all these brambles are the upbringing that you’ve had, the relationships that you’ve had as a child, the and the biases, the patterns, the habits, all those things that have been created, I mean you know, even as teenagers and adults the relationships that you’ve had, the experiences that you’ve had in, in work etc. the experiences that you’ve had in the school. All this things that impact on how you feel about yourself how you think about yourself, and if you can imagine that there’s certain things that you can do for yourself every day, where, basically you can clear those brambles, that are in the way and you can create new pathways going in different directions. So the brain can actually, just, I won’t get too technical, but just with the neurons, basically you can actually get neurons firing in different ways, if you actually train the brain. And it’s interesting that your programme is called the brain train, because it’s so true, you can actually re-create those pathways in your brain and you can create new beliefs about yourself, new patters, new habits. So if we can actually take the time. People first of all don’t realize that we can do this, so it’s only beginning now to get out to the mass populous that actually the brain is malleable. Because up until a few decades ago scientists believed, that whatever way the brain has developed as a child, that’s the what you’re stuck with for the rest of your life. But actually that’s not the case. Does that make sense?
Mary: It’s a bit like a hard disk that you can wipe and re-program as such because you’ve out grown that particular program.
Celine: It’s not hard wired. So you can replace all the negative thought patterns and all the negative habits with positive ones, or ones that are better for you. It takes a little bit of work, you’ve got to put in the little bit of work every single day. But as I say there’s a lot of little techniques that you can implement very single day and after a certain amount of time those new patterns are formed.
Mary: They just kick in automatically.
Celine could you also do training in offices, you go out to schools, you travel around, but you where saying here and just in your brochure you say that70% of problems in organizations are due to poor communication. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, because one of the things I have discovered, is it wouldn’t occur to one person to pass this information on to that one. Or you have a communications board and people won’t even look at it.
So what do you, go in with a stun gun or something? What’s your approach?
Celine: I mean it’s just back again to bringing awareness to people around the fact that they aren’t communicating information. You know, I’m working with a lot of organisations who, a lot of staff within them say “I don’t know what’s going on half of the time”, “I don’t know what’s going on at the top”, “I don’t know what decisions are being made”, “sometimes I don’t know what decisions are until two weeks later and I heard it from somebody else rather than from the person who should have told me”, and I think a lot of the time it’s just, it’s back to, you know, we’ve got so much information coming at us every day, so much information coming at us from the thoughts that are going on in our mind. It’s so difficult to keep up with all information, you know with all the ads all around us, the flashing lights, the traffic lights etc. and so again the brain has shortcuts and these shortcuts it creates to be able to manoeuvre to help you manoeuvre through the world without being an insane mass with all this information coming towards you!
And so the thing is that, as individuals we’ve all created different shortcuts and so, we often forget, we have assumption around communicating the information. So I might assume that, ‘oh you know you don’t need to know that’ or ‘you’ll find out when you need to’ or ‘someone will tell you’ or ‘I’m just too busy doing what I need to do here to be going and having a chat with people’. Everybody’s very, very busy in their daily life at work. So, again it’s just around bringing people’s awareness to: ‘how am I communication this information?’, ‘Am I actually letting people know around me know?’, ‘Am I talking to my colleagues?’, ‘Am I talking to my customers and what do people need to know?’ It’s the assumptions we make, we make assumptions all the time, that people don’t need to get this information or that it will be communicated. And so a lot of the work that we do with organisations is around getting people clear themselves on how they communicate, because of those assumptions that we make, such as ‘If I looks at a person this way, they’ll know that means this, that, and the other’. But that’s not always the case.
Mary: It would make perfect sense that basically you have to have a little meeting in the morning, just to talk about what the plan is today. Because really it brings me back to school, when we had a timetable. You know you had forty minutes per class, forty minutes per class, of math’s or whatever and that structure worked very well.
Celine: It did yeah
Mary: So really in a way something like that in the workplace or in your life as such.
Celine: Yeah, well some of the most successful organisations, they have team meetings every single morning. Now a lot of people say ‘meetings, we don’t have time for meeting’s!’. However meetings can literally be 5 minutes long. All you have to do is ask ‘what’s working well for you this week?’ and then ‘Are there any issues?’ and then if there are any issues you can take them out of that meeting, and sort them out with the people involved. Five minutes for everybody to get-together, looking at what’s working well?, what’s not working so well?, what do we need to do here?, rather that people needing to get stuck sitting there for an hour with everybody having to be have involved when they don’t need to be. The top organisations in the world have little team huddles.
Mary: But it would make sense: here’s the plan for today, what’s on the agenda for today?
Everybody would know what going on, and then you can, move forward
Celine: And any updates, you know this is where sales are at and this is what’s been done in marketing, tor his is what needs to be created here.
Mary: What do you think are some of the improvements that you’ve seen in people who’ve applied your methods?
Celine: You know, again it would be very much around people becoming aware of the things that they do that are negatively impacting on themselves and on others. And once they get this awareness then we help them with, how can you improve this and what daily changes do you need to make? So it’s that awareness and learning the behaviors that will match it. We’re not talking about changing people into something that they are not. It’s just finding the best version of them, the best version of how they can operate in order for them to be more successful in what they’re doing and to be more content in what they’re doing so that they get the end of every day going thinking, ‘yes, I’m happy with what I’m doing’.
Mary: And do you find people end up taking a different career path as a result?
Celine: It happens, because sometimes people will realise ‘actually this is not where I need to be, this is not getting me where I need to, or where I want to be’ and it’s tough at the moment in this country and I think in a lot of places in the world, because people feel like they can’t go and look at another career or another job, because they’re not necessarily out there. It is very frustrating for me to see, people in a job, where they have to be everyday where they don’t like what they’re doing, where they are frustrated or they are angry and then they’re taking that anger one way or another on the work that they do and the people that they work with and also the people that they live with. There’s a lot of people who are falling out with friends, relationships breaking up left, right and center, because people are so frustrated. And the thing is if you’re not clear on why you’re doing something, you’re never going to be content, you are never going to be productive. We were talking earlier about people getting older and putting on a lot of weight, aging very quickly. A lot of this is down to people not doing what they enjoy doing everyday. Even if you’re in a job that’s not making you happy, at least find things in the evenings and weekends to do, with friends or with family. Make sure that if you love going for a run, really work that in to your day. Because that is going to serve you no end, it gives you a break, it clears your mind and also it helps the aging process as well. I’m going off in a tangent here but it help to keep you intact and it keeps, getting back to the neural pathways, it keeps your brain fresher, if you’re out doing the things that you enjoy.
Mary: Well it makes perfect sense. It was interesting was reading a book called the “Magic of thinking big”. I can’t think of the writers name at the moment, but he was saying in America, one of the execs, when he was picking, their top sales people he only picked the ones were happily married. He picked only the ones who were happily married and who do things with their family, because he said at the time they may be on the same par with their sales, but the guy who isn’t happy and doesn’t plan his weekend with his family and his kids and himself, is going to get bored and not be happy. So then he is coming to work, and is not performing well, whereas the other guy is constantly working and putting time into his family and is happy, is going to grow. He was saying, this is what this particular guy did which makes perfect sense.
Celine: Actually I know a couple who are both 60 yrs old recently, who both lost their jobs. They have worked, 12 hours a day, six days a week, never taking a holiday. All the money that they have was buying ‘stuff’. This ‘stuff’ is just sitting there, this ‘stuff’ is not getting used. They’ve lost their jobs and they don’t know what to do now. They haven’t developed any hobbies. They’re life has just been work. What’s the point? Yes, we have to work to survive. Don’t live to work, enjoy your life.
What’s that book, ‘On your deathbed, the five disappointment that most people have on their deathbed’. Something like that!
I can’t remember the main five. But one of biggest, what’s the word I’m looking for, disappointments was that they worked: I worked too hard work, too much, I didn’t spend enough time with my friends and family. I have this conversation with a lot with people, who are very goal oriented, achievement oriented, they really want to be a success and they say “well you know that’s what makes me happy; I work, I work, I work”. Really? You know if you’re on your deathbed are you going to look back going, yeah, I wasn’t born just to do this.
Mary: I remember, Richard Branson was being interviewed by Gay Byrne, I think on the late, late show at the time and Gay was saying to Richard, he said “you are doing so much, how do you have time, how do you have time for this interview?” and Richard said,” It’s quite simple I employ dynamic people, and I pay dynamic wages, which frees me up to do interviews like this and to live,” And then Gay asked him a few time, and Richard said, “but Gay, I pay dynamic people and I pay dynamic wages and if the people stop being dynamic, they move on’. And he said that is one of the keys! So he has all these people who love doing what they do, they get paid well, they got respected and that is that.
Celine: Richard Branson is a really good example of somebody who’s recognised what he is good at, and he spends his time doing what he is good at. He gets all the other people in and as you say, to do the things that his not good actually and that he doesn’t enjoy. He loves talking to people, he loves having new experiences and that’s what he spends his time doing and look how well it has worked for him.
Mary: What about of people doing volunteer work, and maybe just helping them, you know if they want to get out of a job or do something different?
Celine: Two points on that. I think I’ve been very lucky and also I’ve made some decisions in my life around marrying what I work at and my hobbies and the things that I love doing. I managed to bring, as I was saying earlier, the acting with the psychology together and also the producing. I say I’ve been lucky and also that I’ve made decisions because I guess I’ve been lucky enough, I managed to recognise, that I love doing those things and the benefits of those things and the marrying of them all. And, I have a lot of conversations with people who are working in jobs, who don’t like their jobs but haven’t recognized what they would like to be doing instead, or even what their hobbies are. And, so for people who don’t recognize what they would like to be spending their time on, I would say, go out and try lots of different things. Write a list of all the things that you’d like to do. Would you like to go, do a parachute jump? Would you like to learn how to tango dance? Would you like to be able to do thirty laps without stopping? Whatever it is, would you like to learn to sing? Recognize those things and start actually looking for ways to bring those things into your life. So even for something like a parachute jump, there are ways to get to do a parachute jump by helping a charity out, and so volunteering your time to help some sort of group or charity out is a brilliant thing, because you’re ticking boxes for yourself. You are getting to learn new things and you’re getting to help other people out, and as you work, and you volunteer your time helping other people, you also start recognizing how lucky you are, and what you have that maybe those people don’t have. One of the biggest things for keeping yourself feeling content and resilient is actually being grateful for and recognizing the things that you are grateful for. One of the things I do every single morning and every single evening is I tell myself three things that I’m grateful for. Every morning its ‘I’m grateful that I have legs, because I can get out of bed, I can go about my business because I have legs’. If I didn’t have legs, some people don’t, some people can’t use their legs, how lucky am I that I can?!, and so this is one of the things that I’m grateful for. That very thing..reminding myself that every day it, it feeds into the rest of my day and once I’ve identified those things that I’m grateful for. Like this morning I started making a list in my head before I got out of bed about the things that I’m grateful for and there were about eight of them that came into my mind immediately. Now if something was to happen to me later today. You know as in a car crash or something and I have got my brain in a positive state of mind, from knowing that I’m grateful, that’s going to bring me through whatever happens later today. I will be able to bring myself consciously back to the things that I’m grateful for. Okay, maybe I do lose my legs, but I still have those seven other things that I thought of this morning, and that will bring me through to the next day. What’s really interesting is that people who go through something really Harrowing or something really amazing, you know like win the lottery or something like that. Somebody who loses both the power in their body or wins the lottery or gets that massive promotion at work or whatever. You have a few days or a few weeks or a few months or even a few minutes of a high or a low, but eventually everybody comes back to the state that they started out. So if I’m reminding myself what I’m grateful off every morning, then I’m already at a higher state of being than if I hadn’t. So whatever happens to me this afternoon, if I’ve managed to get myself into that state every morning, I’m going to be way better off because whatever happens to me, if I go way down, I’m going to come back into that state, does that makes sense?
Mary: That makes perfect sense, which links into your everyday resilience, which is building your muscle and if you keep building that, that makes perfect sense.
Celine: You need to do it every day.
Mary: Well you get up every day!
Celine: How much effort is it to think a few of those thoughts ever day?
Mary: Yeah one, two, three things, gosh that what’s what I do have.
Celine: Another thing that’s brilliant actually is, when you wake up in the morning make yourself smile. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a real smile and false smile, so if you make yourself smile, you are getting yourself into a happier state getting out of bed and that will carry you through, and regardless again if anything happens this afternoon or tomorrow, just make yourself smile. It will be much easier to react to whatever that thing is.
Mary: If you have just joined us, today’s guest in the studio is Celine Mullins and Celine is from adaptas and we are here talking about basically, Everyday Resilience. How to change your old ways of thinking, to bring in a new way of thinking, to help you move forward basically and there are different ways of doing that and also getting hobbies, doing volunteer work. So Celine if people want to contact you, if they want to get in contact with you, if they want you to go into their business, or their school, would you call out your website and your number for people please?
Celine: Sure yeah it’s www.adaptastraining.com and if anyone want to e-mail us its info@adaptastraining.com.
Mary :OK, and where did you get the name Adaptas from?
Celine: Adaptas is a Spanish word and obviously, it means to adapt. What I love about it is, a Spanish friend of mine, when I asked what she thought of it, as a name, she said it means, ‘get on with it ‘and I think that’s a really good thing, because, you know it’s back to what I was saying about when you wake up in the morning, it’s all about getting on with it, it’s all about choosing how you want to live your life, how you want to react to things. You know because so many people are so stuck right now and if you don’t take control of your own thoughts and your own reactions to things, and take responsibility, then you are going to remain stuck. We are so lucky, because as a species we have these incredible brains, we can change, we can adapt to whatever’s going on we adapt to our environment. We can choose how we adapt to that environment and I guess for me, it really only hit me even though I’ve studied psychology and coaching and everything. It was about four years ago that I really recognised “hang on, every single thing that happens to me, it comes back to me. It’s not somebody else’s fault that I had an argument with them, or we had an argument. It’s not somebody else’s fault that something didn’t go the way I planned. It’s my fault. I have to take responsibility and, and if I take responsibility, everyday is easier. I have much more control over what happens to me and, and what doesn’t happen to me.
Mary: So if somebody wants to start to change things and improve their life, what advice, or where would they go? What would you recommend? A starting point for people? Besides going to you!
Celine: You know, as a say I just think, look at what is working for you and what isn’t. Are you achieving the things that you want to? are you having relationships you want to? are you taking the time to learn the things that you want to? Learning new things is really, really important for keeping the brain young and there’s been a huge amount of research that’s been done on the memory. Memory skills can be improved through learning new things. So they’ve taken people who were in their 60s, 70s and 80s (years old) and got them to learn new technical things. Learning a new language or learning a musical instrument or learning how to use a technical computer program, it can actually rewinds the memory ability back to when it you were 20 or 30 yrs old. So if you are constantly learning things through your life, you are going to keep your brain younger and therefore you are going to be able to respond to things better. You’re going to be able to adapt to whatever comes your way, and so, I would, I guess say, that’s the biggest piece of advice; to make sure that you’re doing the things that you enjoy doing, and keep challenging yourself, keep asking ‘what can I do every day or eat every week?’ or you know whatever amount of time you have, because it will keep you young, will keep you alive, keep you fresh and also. You know the things I was saying earlier and obviously there’s still loads more techniques, but do things like reminding yourself what you are grateful for and then even at the end of every day, (again because I know that a lot of people are feeling very stuck right now, because of the situation and their recession etc) think about the things that you’ve achieve that day, ask yourself ‘what did I achieve today.’ ‘Well I smiled at a stranger in the street and they smiled back and you know that made me feel happy’, or ‘I managed to drink two more glasses of water instead of coffee or beer or whatever…just recognizing those little things you’re doing for yourself every day.
Mary: It’s just a little isn’t it? Just tweaking you don’t have to have the full monty all in one day.
Celine: That’s the thing. A lot of us think, and I used to think this as well, ‘oh if I really want to do the things, that I want to do, I’m gonna have to make massive changes in my life!’ But, actually it’s just a few.
Mary: It’s a little bit very day, isn’t it because otherwise you get overwhelmed,
Celine: And if you manage to do those things for a few days and then you fall of the wagon and you forget to do them, that’s fine just get right back on. If you’re trying to get fitter, and you’re doing exercise everyday and then three days into it, something else comes up and you don’t get to do it, don’t beat yourself up, do it again. Because you’re going to be strengthening the neural connections, you’re going to be learning the new thing, you are going to be keeping yourself happier and healthier, more alive and vibrant.
Mary: And tell me, what do you think is the biggest, if you can answer this, what was the biggest wake up or awareness that you got when you have been going into these different companies and working with these people?
Celine: Oh yeah, that’s another thing that I love about my work, is that I get to work with different individuals and groups every day, and I am constantly learning new things about myself. It’s very funny, because the word expert, I kind of don’t really like the word expert because, I don’t think we are really ever experts in anything. There’s always so much to learn and every group I work with, I learn new things about myself. The day that I don’t think I’m learning something new about myself or other people or communication or relationships, is the day I would stop doing what I’m doing. You know because life is for learning and it really makes me sad when I meet people who don’t value learning or don’t recognize the value of learning. Because life is very short. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We don’t know what’s going to happen in two hours time. It could be over you soon so you might as well make the most of it.
Mary: Yeah I, I suppose maybe some people have the old, school was dreadful, so they don’t want to, and maybe they associate learning with that. But you know, if they went into college and you know it’s pretty good or I’m not doing that anymore. I suppose you can unplug.
Celine: There’s a lot to be said for, I mean we could get stuck on “oh! That was terrible”, “and this was terrible” but what you want to do? Move forward going “ah nah everything is rubbish” or do you wanna go “hey, let’s get on with it!”.
Mary: Ok, well speaking of getting on, call out your website and your number again for people
Celine: Ok sure, its www.adaptastraining.com and the e-mail is info@adaptastraining.com
Mary: Celine Mullins, thank you so much for coming in today. It’s been really enjoyable.
A friend of mine said to me recently: ‘You know if you live to be 80 years old, you will live 4,000 weeks?’
That shocked me to hear, put in that way! When I thought in weeks, I wondered, how much of each week do we all spend actually doing the things we want to, or should be doing?
Think about it, in the past week, how much time have you spent doing the things that you want to do? How effective have you managed to be? Have you implemented any changes aimed at enhancing your well-being and happiness? How much have you learnt or grown as an individual in a week? How many items are there on your list of things to do before you die, that you have not yet done? And another week has just gone by?!
How many weeks do you have left to live? None of us can say for sure!
We all often make promises to ourselves that we are going to do things differently, be that for the sake of our health, wellbeing, relationships, job etc. Then we find it difficult to have the discipline to see that promise to ourselves through.
The thing is that if we don’t see it through, the new behaviour never becomes automatic and so it eventually becomes too much of an effort. The only way to create new habits, is through repetition, until the new neural pathways are stronger than the original neural pathways (the ones that had you doing things the way that isn’t working out so well for you).
For most of us, it is not enough that we WANT to change something. What can often get us through, is having someone else hold us accountable. Having a family member or friend is often not enough, they may hesitate to hold us strictly accountable due to the importance of their relationship with us. In many cases, when we request someone close to us to fulfill this role and then encounter difficulties, we may inadvertently rebel by pointing out their own flaws or areas needing improvement. Hence, having a coach, someone who is not in a relationship (romantic, friend, family) with us, is often the only answer.
Most people who are achieving the success they want, have a coach, (some have many coaches). Most successful people will attribute much of their success to this coach, the person who won’t let them make excuses, or who will hear out the excuses, and then assist them in finding a better or more creative way to achieve what they want through effective coaching.
At Adaptas™, we have a strong focus on building coaching into our programmes, (face-to-face and online) to assist our delegates to keep moving forward, and to repeating the behaviours they need so that the brain changes take place that are required to make the behaviour automatic.
If you are struggling, how many more weeks of the 1, 2 or 3 thousand, you may or may not have left, are you going to wait, before you start working with someone, who will truly hold you accountable to living the life you desire?
I’ve been talking a lot about habits recently; getting rid of the ones that are doing us no good and replacing with ones that are beneficial to our life, including health, work and relationships.
You may recall I mentioned that it takes the average person 66 days for new behaviours to become unchangingly automatic, with research finding it can take some people up to 245 days to change a habit. The reason for this is that it can take a while to strengthen the connection between neurons representing the new behaviour.
However you may not be this patient, I know I certainly am not! Consequently, I have frequently abandoned my efforts to establish new, beneficial, and healthier habits in the past. Some of my attempts have included many efforts to eat healthier, getting fit and staying fit, maintaining a level of contentedness and gratitude in my daily life, blogging weekly about Adaptas™ or topics of interest to clients and friends of Adaptas™, posting daily messages in social media that might be helpful to anyone who cares to read in the area of communication in the workplace and behavioural change. The list goes on and on…frankly, we could be here all day!
Consider this, have you ever envisioned the person you want to become, the knowledge you seek to acquire, or the goals you wish to achieve? Visualisation as a method of actualisation has been extensively studied in Cognitive Psychology and Sports Psychology. Accomplished athletes harness the power of visualisation, which involves mentally rehearsing physical skills without actual movement
Numerous studies with athletes have revealed that combining the mental visualisation of a skill with its physical execution leads to more effective learning and retention of the skill. Any elite athlete will emphasise the significance of mental preparation strategies in achieving peak performance. The underlying science shows that these techniques reinforce the neural pathways crucial for skill enhancement, as previously mentioned.
Having studied Psychology in-depth since my teenage years, I have acquired comprehensive knowledge about the reinforcement of neural connections and related aspects. In fact, my fascination with understanding human nature, our behavior, and the influence of experiences started at a very young age, around 8 years old (possibly even earlier, though I can’t recall those early years). Observing people and their responses to various environments has always intrigued me, however I must admit that my biggest case study has most often been myself.
Even though I knew all about visualisation, it really only hit me recently (i.e. that there are ways to speed up these neuronal connections), through conversation with my colleague Erika Brodnock (Erika Brodnock, CEO and Founder, The Centre for Positive Children Ltd), that if you actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, you can speed up the process of changing your habits!
If you want to learn about effectively visualising (not all of us find it easy!), keep an eye on our blogs in coming weeks.
Following on from last weeks discussion on habits, let’s explore the science of habit forming a little more…
You may recall, I said previously that neurons link up with each other and form strong bonds based on your experiences, emotions, thoughts, and interactions, and that this is how behaviours, habits, and memories are formed. Once a linkage is made, we can either weaken it or strengthen it, based on our experiences etc.
Did you do your homework after last weeks blog? Did you think about what bad habits you might have? Well if you did, consider this:
The more you do something, the harder the habit is to break due to the strengthening of connections in the brain, and the easier it is to find yourself back in the behavioural pattern again, even if you make some attempt to change it. A protein blend collectively known as myelin insulates the wiring between the neurons. Every time you give in to that habit, (the thicker and more dense the myelin coating), the faster a neuron fires, and the more easily it fires.
Now, this is where it gets really interesting:
If you don’t fire the neurons, the myelin starts to unravel and fade away over time. How else would we eventually lose the feelings we felt towards our first love?!
The key to getting rid of unwanted habits, is to choose a new habit to replace the unwanted one with, and then strengthen the neurons through repetition, exposure, and emotions to the point where it becomes an easier path to take than your former one.
As I mentioned in last weeks blog, most of us think of bad habits as things such as eating junk food, smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not doing exercise, checking in on social media pages too much etc.
But if you did your homework from last week, what bad habits did you notice you have, habits that if changed could improve your relationships at home and at work, habits that if changed could improve how you do your job, making you more effective, or less stressed?
What new habit could you choose to develop which you could, with repetition, exposure and emotion (to strengthen the neurons), replace the unwanted one?
Sure, it may take 21 days, it may take 66 days and it may even take 245 days to become unchangingly automatic, but it will surely be worth the effort for a healthier life, more effective communication in the workplace and at home, and hence more successful and rewarding relationships, won’t it?
Just remember that it may take longer than you think to change the habit, but that if you fall off the wagon for a day or two, you can get right back on and keep going. Just because you stop doing the new behaviour, does not mean you are unable to form this new habit. It just means that it is challenging for you because the neurons are linked strongly to each other based on repetition etc.
The great thing is, that the bursts of doing the new thing will be strengthening the neurons each and every time you do it! So if you fall of the wagon, get back on it, don’t beat yourself up and move forward!
And if you want to speed up the process, tune in for upcoming weekly blogs…
I think I can safely say, that for most of us, most of the time, when we endeavour to do the 21 days, to cut out the unwanted or adopt the new healthier behaviour, we generally give up as quickly as we started! Never mind 21 days, we usually stop after just a few days. It is so difficult for us to change a habit, and even the most committed, focused and disciplined of us struggle.
For those of you who are about to embark on a change of habit I have some harsh news for you. It actually takes on average 66 days for new behaviours to become unchangingly automatic. Worse than that, research shows that it can take some people up to 245 days to change a habit!
The good news is that change is possible, when you know how! Recent discoveries in neuroscience have made some amazing discoveries about the ability to learn, change and adapt.
Ever heard the saying ‘“neurons that fire together, wire together”? This refers to the fact that we have cells called neurons within our brains and nervous systems, that are responsible for everything we do. Neurons link up with each other and form strong bonds based on your experiences, emotions, thoughts, interactions with your environment, etc.
Think of it like this; ever hear a piece of music and it reminds you of a certain time in your life, certain person/people, certain clothes, smells, sensations etc? This happens because there was some bit of neuronal wiring, that when the music activated one area of your brain, there was a cascade of electrical impulses to the surrounding neurons. Due to proximity of the neurons, the memories were triggered.
The term ‘brain plasticity’, refers to the lifelong ability of the brain to re-organize neural pathways based on new experiences. We can actually re-wire our brain by choosing what we expose ourselves to. And therefore, habits are possible to break.
Tune in next week if you’d like to learn how to change habits. But before you do that have a think about this; when we think of habits, we think of smoking, couch hogging (i.e. not exercising), eating unhealthily, gambling, checking and re-checking emails or social media pages, to name a few. If you are one of the lucky ones who has none of these vices, do you think you might have other habits that are not serving you well?
For example, how about not recognising the efforts of your colleagues, or not responding to phonecalls, or not implementing the step-by-step instructions you learnt at that staff training you attended?
In last week’s blog, I talked about how the brain has been shaped by evolution to adapt and readapt to an everchanging world (Cozolino & Sprokay, 2006). The thing is, that when things become too comfortable the brain gets lazy.
In one of my favourite books ever ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’, Norman Doidge, states that the way to stave off memory loss into old age is to keep learning new things ‘learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and materials.” i.e you have to want to learn and grow, you have to actively make an effort to do so. You have to want to find new things to learn and then focus on these if you want to hold off old-age memory loss.
Likewise, it is also true that you have to want to find other ways of being, to avoid accepting mediocrity and habitual behaviours.
If you send a child to piano lessons and they don’t like learning the piano, it is highly unlikely that they will learn anything past what they are being set by their teachers for exams. On the other hand, if a child has begged to be able to attend piano lessons, and they really want to learn, then they will want to be great, and they will want to learn to play every song they hear on the radio. And this knowledge will remain with them for years to come, perhaps their whole lives, because they have a passion for learning and they are having fun!
Experts and researchers (e.g. Cozolino & Sprokay, Caine & Caine, and those listed above) all over the world insist that brains grow best in the context of interactive discovery and through co-creation of stories that shape and support memories of what is being learned.
Our focus at Adaptas™, when designing and delivering staff training, is to encourage people to learn new things about themselves, through real active experience and sharing of this experience.
How can you find ways for yourself and your colleagues to want to learn so that everyone will actually learn when attending staff training? How can you make it attractive to learn?
Well I would suggest, firstly, recognize the importance of learning for the longevity of your memory (reading Norman Doidge’s book will inspire you, I promise!). Secondly, think back to when you were a child, and you like making up stories and playing games and generally using your imagination…this is how we learnt as children, and believe it or not, this is how we learn as adults…learning needs to be engaging, fun and full of imagining the possibilities!
Let us know if you and your colleagues are ready to play, and in doing so learn, grow and keep your brain fresh and alive!
