Meet Your Brain
For my final post in the series on the books that have made the biggest impact on my coaching practice, I choose Your Brain at Work by David Rock. It outlines the implications of all the recent research in neuroscience to the way we function at work – as employees, as bosses. There are several terrific takeaways from it, notably, that the pre-frontal cortex – the front of the brain where complex calculations take place, decisions get made and self regulation gets handled – is easily exhausted. It needs a great deal of rest and glucose. Our ability to think clearly, make good decisions and manage ourselves erodes steadily over the course of the work day.
David Rock also shares his model expressing what people need for their brain to be at its best, known as the SCARF Model:
Status – a clear sense of our own self worth and the acknowledgement of this perception in our environment is critical to our brains feeling good.
Certainty – we crave certainty the way we crave sugar or any other reward. We will avoid uncertainty at all costs.
Autonomy – it is critical that we feel as much control over our environment as we are capable of managing; loss of control is interpreted by the brain as a serious threat.
Relatedness – we will naturally find what we have in common to increase relatedness, we will move toward people with whom we can relate believing them to be like ourselves, and away from those to whom we cannot relate making them “other”.
Fairness – is as rewarding as food or sex, and when things are perceived as “unfair” it causes us to feel an intense sense of threat.
For more on The SCARF Model check out some of David’s YouTube videos. The book is also a really fun read, and there is a lot more that what I can share here!
The E-Myth Revisited
As a fledgling coach with a private practice, back in the day when if you said you were a coach the inevitable question was “oh, what sport?” a book that made an earth shaking difference was the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. If you are in business, thinking of starting a business or have a friend or loved one who is suffering in a business, this book is a must. There are several brilliant ideas in this book including:
- If you have started a business, you are either a technician (that’s what I was as a coach, so is your friend who loved to knit and started a knitting shop), a manager (the guy who understands the processes and systems that a business must have to succeed – people who buy franchises are usually managers) or a visionary (the person who sees a gap in the market place – Don Fisher started The Gap because he couldn’t find a pair of jeans, Steve Jobs wanted computers to be friendly). You might have a little of the other two but you are primarily one of these and if you are going to succeed you need to partner with others who have the other two or find a way to grow yourself enough to get the other two covered. It is stunningly simple and true. The crazy thing is that as I have moved out of the small business world into the corporate world, I find that the same holds true for leaders inside organizations who need to be “intrapraneurs”.
- As a business owner, you need to find a way to spend as much time working on your business as you spend working in your business. Obvious? Maybe, but in 1995 I didn’t know it. Again, totally applicable to people in organizations.
- Anything that works in the business must be systemized and if possible automated. You have to do this so if you get the flu and can’t make it in, the whole house of cards doesn’t fall down. You also have to do it so you can grow. It was the compelling evidence for how important this is that made me start my own coaching company with coaches using my system to coach the audience I had mastered. And finally, I have used this maxim again and again as a manager in a much larger machine and it has served me well.
Michael Gerber has many other books out and has an institute and all that, but for sheer straightforward simplicity for people who maybe don’t think of themselves as “business” people, this book is a bible.
Going With the Flow
Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced mee-high chick-sent-mee-high, my friend David Rock told me that, and he is important because he wrote one of my top books The Brain at Work) is another book that stopped me in my tracks. Published in 1990, my copy is old, much dog eared and underlined. The author is more recently widely known as a pioneer in the Positive Psychology arena, and his early work outlined in Flow was required reading for coaches because it was solid research about what makes people feel good. Absent real problems like psychological damage, war or pestilence, people were coming to coaches with the objective of optimizing their existence and more specifically, their time at work. Csikszentmihalyi says that in his studies, when people reflected on their most positive experiences they seemed to share one if not all of these characteristics:
- “ the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.”
- we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.”
- The task has “clear goals and
- Provide immediate feedback
- There is deep but effortless involvement that shuts out the noise of everyday life
- We are able to exercise a sense of control over our actions
- Self consciousness disappears, but sense of self emerges more strongly after the experience is over
- The sense of time passing is altered; minutes can seem like hours, or hours can feel like minutes.” (Harper, 1991, pg. 49)
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory was that to achieve flow we needed to maintain the balance between the level of challenge of the activity, and our skill level – if the challenge is too low, we become bored, if it is too high we become overly anxious. Each individual needs to monitor their own challenge level to keep it optimal to stay engaged. 
This rang so true for me, and it was extremely useful in work with clients who were clearly bored, but judging themselves for it, thinking they had perfectly jobs and should be happy. Not so! To stay in Flow, it is critical to constantly be raising the bar. This is not totally true for everyone all the time, but for some people, some of the time, the model is extremely useful.
Habits Make All the Difference
The promise was books that rocked my coaching practice that are off the beaten path. OK, so maybe this one isn’t that original, and I must have stumbled on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey in Barnes and Noble because I can’t remember who recommended it. But I have to say that from the day I read this book, I changed some habits that utterly altered the trajectory of my life. I don’t think it is a coincidence that when I started doing what Covey said (and let’s be clear, not everything, just a few things made a huge difference) my business took off, my household became more orderly and calm and my quality of life shot up. I developed a reputation for being freakishly productive. I feel that almost every other “self-help” book that came after this one simply fleshed out some of the good ideas that were here in the first place.
In the section called Put First Things First, the 4 box quadrant probably made the biggest impact on me. The idea is that we all can put every single thing we do into one of the four quadrants.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | QUADRANT I crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects |
QUADRANT II prevention, Principle Centered activities, relationship building, recognizing and leveraging new opportunities, planning the future, recreation |
| Not important | QUADRANT III interruptions, some calls, some mail, some reports, some meetings, popular activities |
QUADRANT IV trivia, busy work, some mail, some phone calls time wasters, pleasant activities |
The ones who spend the bulk of their time doing things in the “important” quadrants are simply going to have a much higher life satisfaction quotient. This very concrete model gave me the courage to say no to things that did not fall into the Quadrants I or II. Today, I let people assume I am extremely busy (everybody does) and if pressed I will admit that I am no busier than anyone else, just extremely focused on what is most important to me and ferociously choosy about what I focus on. Don’t tell anyone.
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders 3
1. The division between thoughts and feelings is in fact an artificial one. From a brain standpoint they are indistinguishable (Phelps). The best ways to understand what you are thinking and feeling is to make time to reflect upon them, (Ochsner et al) and use language to label them (Lieberman et al). This means you will need a trusted advisor who will listen to you, e.g.: get a coach if you don’t already have one.
2. Habits are driven by the unconscious. Some are useful, some are not. It serves you well to notice your habits, examine each one and choose whether or not you want to allow it to continue (Rock).
Who Do You Aim To Please?
Throughout the course of our lives, we’re constantly trying to impress someone.
As kids, we want our parents to be proud of us. We want our friends to think we’re cool. We want our teachers to think we’re smart.
As we get older, we still want our parents to be proud of us. We still want our friends to think we’re cool. And now, instead of teachers, we want our colleagues and clients to think we’re smart.
Then, one day we wake up and realize we’re spending most of our waking hours trying to live up to someone else’s expectations. We’re spending more time trying to make everyone else happy than we are on meeting our own needs. We’re not necessarily unhappy, but we’re unfulfilled.
Depending on how we choose to look at it, that unfulfilled feeling can be a blessing or a curse. We can either let it spiral out of control into a deep depression or, hopefully, we can choose to use it as a wake up call.
To determine if your life needs a slight course correction, ask yourself the following questions:
“Whose life am I living?”
You only have one life to live, you might as well make it your own.
“Am I being selfish enough?”
You can’t take care of others if you’re not taking care of yourself.
To have any chance at spreading sustained happiness to others, it’s vital to make sure that YOU are happy. From time to time, do a check-in to make sure that YOUR needs are getting met so that YOU are able to continue to meet the many needs of all the important people in YOUR life.
The Secret Powers of Time
The Secret Powers of Time is one of many brilliant videos in the RSA Animate series by the RSA. In the video, Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health, and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships, and how we act in the world.
In coaching, simply having an awareness and understanding of the time perspectives of those you coach is invaluable. Within the context of time, we’d like to see all of our clients be future-oriented. Those that come into coaching already future-oriented are more likely to be able to quickly move into action on their growth and development goals. That’s not to say that individuals who are past/present-oriented can’t achieve the same, however, it might take a little more work and, most definitely, a different approach.
Take the time and watch the video below to learn more. Share your take-aways in the comment box.
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