There has been much talk over the years about the differences between the right hemisphere (RH) and left hemisphere (LH) of the brain. While we now know that it isn’t as simple as saying that creativity is more RH, or that logic is more LH and that both are needed for BOTH processes, we do know this: there are still profound differences in the way each side of the brain takes in the world around it. And this divide has profound implications in understanding executive leadership.
First, a Little Neuroscience Some basics: The LH is the hemisphere that allows us to see the detail, understand sequences and focus on the parts. Things like understanding metaphor, implicit meaning, and even the ability to read others’ emotions are correlated with the RH. The LH also can only see itself and what it already knows whereas the RH can see the whole of things and make connections. The RH also takes in all new information. This divide is perhaps most interestingly summed up in Iain McGilchrist’s TED talk on the divided brain.
Where Managers’ Brains Get Stuck
Good managers focus on pieces, parts, sequences. It is not their job to hold the whole picture—only the picture of their program or their part of the system. When they move into executive leadership, they often find themselves challenged to broaden the scope of their leadership. This often includes things like big picture thinking to feeling empathy for others around them. As a coach, I see this struggle reveal itself in language when leaders come to their coaching sessions and only speak from a place of “I,” often parsing out THEIR contributions, what THEY need and what would be best for THEM, instead of speaking from a place of “we” and acknowledging the bigger picture that is made up of everyone’s contributions. For the emerging executive leader, it’s no longer about just their personal performance or making a good program run well; their challenge becomes to look at all parts and functions in relation to the broader, implicit meaning of the whole business, organization or system. For example, I coach a leader who is running a consumer products business. Most sessions start with her feeling challenged about an operational issue and struggling with how to make people feel as if they have a stake. She sees each person as utility, rather than as someone to get to know, connect with, get curious about, empathize with, develop and grow. While this leader has a high ability to sequence, plan, execute, and solve immediate problems, she gets stuck in her LH, the land of "operationalizing" and “literalizing.” In this land, employees are seen as utility, and not whole beings to nurture, grow and develop. The impact is that the broader meaning of their employees' work is relegated to function—it becomes just about the product, or the utility of a program or a function of the business or organization. And this “literalization” in leadership has profound implications for setting back brands, movements or anything larger than the task or function of the entity. Her growth, therefore, as a leader, is being able to connect the broader meaning of the values, work and philosophy of the company to the functions of the team, as well as to develop empathy for her people. As well, the LH only sees itself; it only knows what it already knows, so gets "stuck" in its own perspective. I once witnessed a manager argue with an advisor about how she was right and he was wrong. She even went so far as to say those exact words rather than just recognize he simply had a different perspective. When you are unable to take in others’ perspectives, you know you are stuck in your LH. It keeps you in your own world of “this is right because this is what the textbook says,” or “this is right because of this theory,” or “this is right simply because these were the values by which I was raised.” Stronger executive functions allow the brain to operate from a place of seeing many different perspectives in order to make the right decision. The Successful Executive Brain Effective executive-level leaders have an ability to go back and forth between hemispheres with ease, like one of my clients, Helen Russell, the CEO of California-based Equator Coffees & Teas. Helen operates from this intersection, and it has allowed her to build a strong brand, winning the company the California Small Business of the Year Award in 2016. On the surface, Helen is a “doer”; you might find her in one of her stores moving things around, or taking out the broom and sweeping up. She’s in constant task mode. If you get the opportunity to sit with her, you experience different hemispheres of her brain at work. You will hear her talk about the philosophy and meaning behind Equator, share a new insight, or witness her brain fire in the realm of intuition and magical coincidence. She listens to ideas and then instinctively knows how to take them and weave them into the broader fabric of what the company stands for. What Helen does so well is connect part to whole, task to meaning, sequence to system. In other words, she leads the company from a brain space of integration, creativity, logic and intuition, firing in both hemispheres. This comes through most prominently in the company's branding via her sharing of her personal trips to her farm in Panama, where her team grows and harvests award-winning coffee. It also comes through her social media posts about cycling with her fellow bike riders and coffee drinkers. It’s even in the meditation classes she chose to offer at her San Francisco café, bringing together community around mindfulness (not just coffee!). It’s in the stories of the roasters she brings into her shops from communities where Equator’s coffee beans are grown. It’s not just pushing a bunch of pictures of coffee onto Equator’s social media feeds because that is what the company “does.” It’s effectively knowing how her brand influences a movement, how all the parts stand for something more implicit in meaning, more metaphorically connected to an inclusive and universal human experience. And yes, experiences even non-coffee drinkers can get behind. Intuition and synchronicity are common themes in her stories, both topics I’ll tackle in another post! Tips for New and Emerging Executives So, what to do if you’re a new or inexperienced executive leader running a business or organization and you're stuck in the parts and can't see the forest through the trees? How do you build that executive function muscle so you don’t get stuck in your LH? Surround yourself with people with different perspectives. As I wrote in a previous blog article, “5 Secrets to Innovation,” meeting with people and getting their perspectives will help inform your own thinking. Even if you think you are right, chances are, there’s another valuable perspective and way of seeing something you hadn’t considered before. Just because you feel you are right doesn’t mean you are right. If you have trouble taking in differing perspectives, find yourself getting uncomfortable or coming up with lofty, logical arguments to refute the other side (again, LH), you know you need more work regulating this left-hemisphere thinking. When that happens, take time to reflect and ask yourself these questions: What is the bigger picture here? What is valuable about this perspective? How might this other individual be feeling? What is it like to be in their shoes? Get a coach. Seriously. I mean it. There are a lot of coaches out there for every kind of person. A coaching conversation with a skilled coach will largely consist of the coach posing the types of questions new executives need to be challenged with to get their thinking about parts, process, program and pieces connected to the greater whole of what they are doing. And though the leader may have the ability to make those connections, they are likely making them in a disjointed way. You see leaders operating either in spaces of complete chaos (can’t get it together, anxiety overload, can’t regulate their time or schedules) or total rigidity (can’t take in anothers' perspective if it differs from theirs, seen as a tyrant by constituents because things need to be a certain way, bogged down in tasks and details and complaining of never being able to see the bigger picture). Right and left hemisphere integration can build the competencies needed for effective executive leadership. Meditate. One of the things meditation does is help to regulate brain hemispheres by increasing connections between the hemispheres and in the case of long term meditators, thickening the corpus callosum. These connections can help regulate the brain to better manage between rigidity and chaos. A lot of executive leaders, though they function within that sweet spot, still vacillate between the two extremes—from bouts of creativity and late nights in one moment, to being stuck and overwhelmed with process or details in another. Meditation can help you build better wiring between the hemispheres to develop the soft competency integration brings that is so needed in executive leadership. Practice active listening. Active listening is another way to practice being present, which is a form of meditation. Being present, taking in perspectives and just listening without conjuring up a response to something will also help you build your executive leadership competency. Try to really hear, and consider, and go back and put yourself in others’ perspectives and see what has the logical possibility of being true from those perspectives. Lastly, it is not logically necessary that just because one is a manager it means they are always getting stuck in their LH. There are many talented leaders who haven’t made it to the ranks of executive level leadership who have the ability to look and see beyond their function to how things connect and relate in a bigger picture sense. As well, there are executive leaders that get stuck in their LH all the time and lack empathy and an ability to see the whole picture. The key is having developed enough neural connections so the hemispheres are well regulated and so there is an ease moving from one hemisphere to the other when you are stuck, whether the stuckness occurs in the RH or the LH. And, in full disclosure, the more my colleagues and I learn about the hemispheres and the brain in general, the more endlessly complex we are realizing this system is. For now, I hope this insight on the RH and LH can serve to empower you in some way, and offer you a new ways to develop and understand true executive leadership abilities. Where do you find yourself getting stuck in your leadership? What do you do to move yourself beyond it? Note: Thank you to my Neuroscience Intensive coaching colleagues for their time and work compiling and sharing research on the right and left brain hemispheres which inspired the writing of this post. Thank you to Ann Betz, Research Director at BeAbove Leadership, for your help translating and understanding the research. Like What You Read? Sign up for my monthly e-news!
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Let’s start with morning rituals. In the past year-and-a-half, I developed a morning ritual consisting of meditation, journaling and consciously assessing on a scale of 1-10 how happy I wake up on that day (10 being completely blissed out to the max, and 0 at a basic level of hopelessness). This may seem excessive and even weird, I know. (Those of you who really know me know that I am a little weird anyway!) But in the discipline of coaching, self care actually becomes a critical ally for being available and offering yourself at your highest level in service to your clients. That is the reason I focus on how I feel each morning so much. Anyway, the process has trained me to be more aware of how I’m feeling in the moment. It has helped me to reflect on the circumstances, relationships or events that made me choose that number on a daily basis. This self-reflection, along with spending the past 4 years constantly reading up on the latest neuroscience research on happiness, inspired me to share my insights about happiness. Why is it that so many people who seemingly have everything – a thriving business, millions of dollars in the bank, a seemingly stable relationship – still rank low on their happiness index? What REALLY makes us happy? How can we bring more happiness into our lives? 1. Understand that your brain is plastic Neuroplasticity is, simply put, the brain’s ability to change over time. And studies show we do actually have a happiness set point. In other words, no matter how much tragedy or what happens to us, we go back to a set point of happiness. (It’s the reason why, for example, there is no real change in one’s happiness set point before they win the lottery vs. after they win.) Psychology says there are a few things you can do to increase your happiness baseline – namely, focusing on gratitude and service. Similarly, research shows that meditation grows areas in our brain associated with positivity (left hemisphere) and compassion (right hemisphere), which can also increase our happiness set point. In my experience, it IS possible to re-wire your happiness set point, if even just to give it a slight increase. So, start with the belief in your own neuroplasticity. Actually, it’s not just a belief - it’s neuroscience! 2. Feel the lows in order to feel the highs Some days I have woken up and felt like a 7 in terms of happiness and have thought, Hey, I’m doing pretty good today. And then upon further reflection, that same morning I could also be in touch with a deep sadness about something. How can we be profoundly happy and at the same time profoundly sad about something? As self-awareness increases, our ability to identify and feel two perhaps very distinct feelings at once also becomes heightened. We become more aware of our integration. The sadness doesn’t trump my happiness per se, but they both exist in me at the same time. Brené Brown, the touted TEDX speaker, was spot-on in her famous Ted Talk on vulnerability when she pointed out that when we suppress our negative emotions (depression, frustration, sadness, etc.), we end up suppressing the positive ones as well – joy, fulfillment, happiness. So to feel those high places, you absolutely need to take trips to the dark, deep, dank, hopeless emotions of your subconscious basement. I know – I hate going there as well … like HATE! But what I’ve discovered from being able to “be” with those hard emotions and to really feel the lows, is that it helped open up the space to experience the more positive emotions. Whether through coaching, group get-togethers, having an amazing friend with a keen ability to listen or even writing about these feelings, the more we can embrace this idea of feeling places that are not comfortable for us emotionally, the more we make space and open ourselves up to feeling the positive emotions of life. For example, I started journaling a few years back as part of my daily routine. It helped pass so many feelings through me that today I don’t know what I would do without this journaling practice. I felt a visible improvement in my mood and happiness on a DAILY basis, simply from having daily self-reflection. Think of it like going to the bathroom; in the same way that you have to release stuff from your gut to clean out your system and make it available for more food and energy to process, reflection allows you to do the same cleaning with your brain. Heh heh. :) 3. Hum (I know it sounds weird, but trust me on this one!) For this, you need to know about the vagus nerve, our 10th cranial nerve. The vagus nerve is fascinating and stimulating (literally), as it is the only nerve that connects to every major organ in the human body. If you haven’t Googled “vagus nerve,” you absolutely should because it is fascinating! So fascinating, it makes me want to start a t-shirt line in honor of its critical importance to our life force and evolution of consciousness and sell it in hipster card shops in Oakland! According to this article on vagus nerve stimulation, low vagal tone (an internal biological process referring to the activity of the vagus nerve, according to Wikipedia) has been linked to depression, inflammation, diabetes and other ailments. Humming (along with slow breathing and other things) was cited as a process that actually INCREASES vagal tone by stimulating the vagus nerve. After reading this, it hit me. I realized that I was ALWAYS humming SOMETHING. Walking in the grocery store, driving my car, cleaning the house and definitely while I was sitting on my surfboard, I always had a tune in my head that I quietly hummed to myself. Could it be that humming was responsible, in part, for my happiness? Stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline and even dopamine) are released in us when we are at lower level resonating consciousness (the states of fear, hopelessness, frustration). Another way to think about this is that our pre-frontal cortex (PFC) or higher level thinking brain gets knocked "offline" and norepinephrine and dopamine (the two main chemicals balancing healthy function of the PFC) are then thrown off balance. By simply humming and constantly stimulating your vagus nerve, you increase vagal tone, and actually equalize some of the inflammatory hormones in the body. In other words, we are equipped with an internal stress regulator! This is the scientific reason behind why something like chanting OM is associated with bringing in peace and resonance. It’s because it’s actually stimulating the vagus nerve and increasing our vagal tone. It’s why music, dancing, drumming and vibrations have played such a crucial role for us through the evolution of humanity and spirituality. So, the next time you feel a pang of anxiety come on, try humming. Try it when you are driving or walking. Just hum to yourself always. In fact, quit reading this and go and hum! 4. Protect yourself from toxic people It took a lot of lessons – A LOT – to figure out how to spot toxic energy and people, and to make the conscious choice NOT to engage. Admittedly, I get swept away by some gnarly tides of energy; I am very sensitive to others and often find myself taking on their energy or emotional states via our mirror neuron process. To assess and become aware of toxic energies, here’s a tool to use: Metaphor. For example, when I meet someone, I sometimes think of a metaphor of what it was like to be with that person in terms of ocean conditions. (Remember: metaphors are lint catchers for the brain; sometimes you can’t evaluate or see the relationship you are in, so tying it to a metaphor helps the brain see and latch on to your experience or process of it more quickly than just trying to use words to describe or make sense of it.) I ask myself, If this person were ocean conditions, what kind of conditions would they be? Ocean Beach on a crazy-ass day (strong current pulling me down the beach, rough shore break)? Or is the experience more like a fun day at Bolinas – a gentle bohemian enclave of a beach just north of San Francisco – predictable, stable and light? The metaphor process helps me figure out the stability of the energetic zone I’m relating to, or at least what the ride would potentially feel like down the road if I were in a relationship with a particular person. Once you figure out what your metaphor is (it doesn’t have to be the ocean; maybe it could be movie genres – nightmare, fairy tale, dark comedy or cars – whatever tickles your fancy), figure out what your choices are. I love my surfing metaphor because it gives me 2 options: 1. Get off the wave if it is not the wave you want to be on, or if you just can’t handle it. 2. Change your equipment and try a more stable board and venture at it again (i.e. - equip yourself with a better set of tools and skills to deal with the toxic and unstable conditions by making yourself more stable). That’s it – change something in yourself to deal with it, or get off it. Keep it clean. Now when I come into contact with a person, I am aware of how I feel, how my body reacts, and what wave I’m on. Use this for friends, business partners, relationships, etc. These are a few hacks I picked up in life regarding the question of personal happiness. I hope some of them are helpful to you. What insights or practices have you found that have helped you cultivate happiness within yourself? Share your thoughts below!
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