Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

When good people come to work with personality disorders or out of control impulses, the entire workplace suffers. Yet peers often grapple with what they can do to help … and problems tend to get worse as tone takes a dive or people lose patience. Have you seen it?

It helps to look at destructive impulses from a brain based perspective. Check out interesting research over at Sci-Tech, to see newly discovered location of self control functions within the brain.

"There's been a lot of interest in impulse control. Because poorly controlled impulses are a great source of human misery, everything from substance addiction to personality disorders," Dr. Martha Farah, director of the Centre for Cognitive Neurosciences at the University of Pennsylvania told CTV's Canada AM.

Here are five tips that tend to help workers who struggle with poorly controlled impulses.

1. Encourage change in smaller increments at first. Until people gain new skills - help them to accomplish more by starting small. Each time they meet a benchmark, regardless of how low they started, they’ll find motivation to move onto the next high watermark.

2. Create a caring community climate where people can develop the social mechanisms at the same time they enjoy talents other workers add to the mix. Start by creating daily routines from insights and suggestions that people bring to a brainstorming session for building a community vision.

3. Encourage workers to advance at their own rates. We know that successful people sometimes start slow, especially those who come with disadvantages. Yet studies show that when encouraged to excel,  people often leap to new tunes simply because others believe they can achieve more.

4. Challenge workers to use unique strengths at work. Start conversations with topics a person cares about deeply, for instance, and link projects at work to talents that relate to their lives at the moment. When people discover how to engage their multiple intelligences at work - they tend to come alive for your shared vision.

It’s rarely easy to turn impulsively negative behavior into sustained goodwill overnight. Motivation often begins with steady tone - set by fellow workers. Weaker peers often begin to find ways to motivate themselves far faster though … when they experience step-by-step progress in a challenging but caring community.

The key is to start where workers stand at the moment … hold them accountable for challenging tasks they enjoy … and show them that others believe and hope in them to succeed. In so doing you make it harder for weaker employees to turn away from self-control - and easier to focus on each step towards a new bend in their career.  Could it also mean new peace and productivity where you work?