Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Today I spent three hours on the golf course and that’s why I am working tonight. Was it worth it? You bet. A sport like golf allows me to capitalize on my kinesthetic intelligence and it’s better for business than most people realize.

What do people where you work take away from sports? People who stay in top mental form for the next golf game often bring smoother shots that can land the next business project scores in a winner’s circle. Kinesthetic knowing is more about daily choices than about age or health barriers.

In spite of a recent bout with cancer … Marjorie Brewer at  60 … still swings a driver like a pro and putts like a metronome. She’s out four times a week … near the grounds of her new senior living residence. People far younger struggle to keep up … and it’s a good game when you can. In one of the persistent mysteries of an aging brain … Marjorie found there are tremendous health care benefits to doing what she loves most – golf. But I see far more than bodily health … in Marjorie’s high-performance mind.

At 58 … Murray Jensen expected golf to help his brain to slow the effects of  cardiovascular disease … which is central to many of the symptoms of old age.  Murray’s doctor tells him that he seems to be slowing or delaying and likely even preventing many mental changes that could result from his frail health ….  

By expecting your brain to be fast and strong and alert … you actually build new neuron pathways to make that happen. Did you know the brain demands 21 percent of the entire oxygen to your body?  Not surprisingly … when you move more … you enrich that supply and add to your brain’s potential.

At Brain based business … we often look at ways to optimize brainpower and … and sports can reinforce winning mental patterns. When my team won this year’s District Rotary Annual Golf Tournament in New York …  we did it by expecting serotonin … the brain’s well-being hormone … to improve our golf scores to 4 under par….

Serotonin, for instance, opens new ideas and possibilities… when you need it most. This hormone for well-being is essential to a good game and it is increased at work when you simply expect it to help you out. We deliberately built more serotonin on the golf course today… by wishing others well as they approached the tee… by imaging great shots whenever we went into a swing … and by refusing to focus on the mistakes of a bad shot … in favor of the lesson learned for the next controlled swing.

Can you see how sports may be good for your brain … and how high performance brains take similar pathways to the winners circle? Sports tend to teach us how.