Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

A friend and fellow leader today asked … “Would you agree that human nature’s lazy and procrastinates?”

What a great question – filled with opportunities to show the remarkable plasticity of the human brain for change. Did you know for instance that what you do today, and how you do it reshapes your brain physically? Or are you aware that your brain can rejuvenate and create successful life skills far beyond your golden years? How so?

The human brain holds a center … called the basal ganglia … where we store patterns and routines. Where do they come from? Interestingly, habits come far less from “human nature” than most realize. Why do we feel like being lazy then?

Whatever we do daily eventually makes its way from the working memory to rewire your basal ganglia.  That’s how you change habits of procrastination to smart skills for being in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.

Say you cultivated neuron pathways for laying around rather than finishing some project? Each new step you take today … to complete that project … will gradually rewire your basal ganglia … with successful skills for completing work with zest.  

Do you see how you wire your own “human nature” for success or failure? What you do shapes the routines that define you as unique. Victims who see themselves as stuck in their problems, will stay stuck … because they will build victim routines into their basal ganglia daily. We each get hit with 22 stressors daily … and victims sink with these while high performance minds fight back.

Here’s how it works.  Each time you set clear targets, and motivate yourself to follow through and do one concrete strategy to reach them, you set your “human nature” for example, to become more successful, alive and timely.

Change will improve today’s workplace, when we link smart skills to personal targets for improvement. Imagine the capital or creativity that would accompany a mixture of hard and soft skills so that we integrate the best of both to solve problems at work. Start small and your basal ganglia gradually take over to deliver skills with zip.

Hard and soft skills no longer cut it when we define or apply them separately. The workplace has changed and successful people out there integrate the best of hard, with the best of soft in ways that build new neuron pathways for results. Observe the most successful leader you know today, and see how that person uses far more integrated skills to solve complex problems for results. Why can smart skills work where hard and soft fall short?

New research about the high-performance mind energizes leaders’ and learners’ brains for results. Through brain based strategies, you could say that human nature is rebooted daily for mind-bending performances, that draw from hidden and unused parts of the brain.  In today’s bio tech era we need smart skills – which I like to think of as a combination of hard and soft skills with zip for new integration.

Smart skills include new ability to question, target, move multiple intelligences, expect results, and reflect to inspire and generate ongoing change.

Do you use smart skills to improve your basal ganglia? I’m speaking of the acumen that would spark activity to ignite both sides of the human brain.  Those who do so might visualize and calculate in the same moment as Einstein solved problems, for instance. 

Victims will always be with us, and we cannot change that. Yet they challenge us to use new smart skills that support and build successful communities, ready to tackle new challenges in today’s workplace. What do you think? Has your human nature grown lazy … or do you procrastinate?