A collection of brains

In aprevious life, I used to develop and deliver global leadership programs and, while it was a team effort, I often had the task of building a simulation thatwould help the leaders to discover the needs of leadership in the future sothat that they could start to build their capability. It was like a simulator –loads of learning but no one dies. These simulations are immensely complicated as you have to recreate a version of the client organisation in a future state,build a multi- team environment with realistic financials and behind it and ensure that learnings will emerge. It’s wonderful when it’s done but – like themaking the law and sausages – it was not a process that you would want towatch. I had to submerge myself in the mechanics and the detail. My colleaguesthought it was hilarious because I had to check out for a couple of weeks butin reality it was extremely hard. I could do it but it took its toll on my moodand my overall productivity. I was good at it but it was not good for me.

‍

With this experiencein mind, I recalled the episode on We Not Me, with Sue Langley. Her entire focus is to help us think about what isgood for our brains. Yes, that means our brains thinking about what’s good forthem! Sue is a global expert in positive psychology, neuroscience anemotional intelligence and she brings brain science to the practical work of work.

‍

Two words jumped out for me that Sue urged us to see differently: wellbeing and strengths. Wellbeing is a broad topic but the most important aspect of it is the wellbeing of the brain. If the brain isn’t well, how can we take the right exercise and eat theright things? The point about strengths hit home even harder. In performance conversations, there is an over 50% difference in outcomes if the coach focuses on strengths versus deficiencies but what are strengths? It’s easy to think of this as skills but Sue encouraged our listeners to think of the strengths for the brain: when does your brain feel at its best? That is a true strength asit’s sustainable.

‍

Operating away from our strengths can lead to stress and one study showed that the limbic response of the brain to stress can reduce our IQ by 13%. Just when we need our smarts the most, we get more dumb. Not ideal, but this is our brain reacting to a situation that we would do better not to put it in.

‍

Looking back, developing simulations was seen as a strength of mine but in reality my brain didn’t see it that way! Sometimes we need to do hard things – indeed that was a large part of the satisfaction of doing the job - but I would now be more aware of which parts of the tasks were true strengths for my brain and look for other lovely brains to help with the other parts.

‍

There’s a broaderlesson here. A WAG on X (previously Twitter) wrote ‘I always thought that thebrain was the most amazing of all our organs. Then I realised which organ wastelling me that.’ So true. But this could be the time to let our brains be alittle self-centred. We should get our brains to tune into their own wellbeingand whether they are playing to their strengths. If not, we can make smalladjustments to improve matters and that often requires us to have a collectionof different brains around us to help. We call that collection of brains ‘ateam’.

‍