Yikes! The younger generation says that my generation is stuck in its ways … and it seems they might be right. They claim we never change and conclude they should "let the old socks be." Have you heard it?
In response, I can buy new knitting needles, gum raison bagels, rock back my yesteryears, or I can change and move forward in my career. I say let’s leap for the latter and look again how the 50’s-something generation either gains or loses brain cells daily. 
Focus on brain facts, and you’ll spot five realities to support those young generation rants about our ruts. Why? We fail to change, and our minds stall in deadly pit stops, whenever we …
1. View IQ as a fixed number that represents limitations – and miss more intellectual opportunities to think and act like Aristotle or Einstein than most people realize.
2. Insist we can teach through lectures and talking as if trumping the verbal approach works, when glaring new facts show a speech’s futility to pass on much of anything but boredom.
3. Think that hard knocks make us wiser and abandon our roles as lifelong learners alongside experts of any age. It’s no longer so, according to new research at the University of Leicester. Conversely, they found that adversity makes its victims more vulnerable to suggestions and lies. Oops –another rock in the bag?
4. Fail to reverse, “I can’t” expressions into, “I can” opportunities through increased serotonin and decreased cortisol for new adventures.
5. See ourselves as having arrived rather than still en route. From the brain’s perspective, that false vision, leads the brain to fall back on comfortable storage places in basal ganglia regions with promote, old shoe tactics. Your foot ware may have been fashionable in another era, but has long since ceased to move much of anything forward.
When we operate more from the brain’s basal ganglia, than from its working memory – we fail to mix in newer ideas or to wear new shoes that fit the current generation’s facts and discoveries at their fingertips.
More importantly? How can we jumpstart our brains – so that they perform better than a bag of rocks? How can we reboot those pulsating mental engines for change and adventure to replace one rut daily?
Now there’s another brain based business block buster that will be fun to write soon! Any ideas that could kick that topic?
Loved this post Ellen! Us middle-agers HAVE to keep changing, keep learning, keep "I can't" out of the vocabulary, and most of all, stop thinking about "the end" and keep focusing on the journey! All the best.
Posted by: Terry Starbucker | December 10, 2006 4:23 PM | Permalink to Comment