Some say with relief that the old economy’s gone. Other’s say that new markets may never emerge. I say that leaders can invigorate wealth and open opportunities in at least 10 amazing areas. So what’s the problem?
15 million Americans look for work, while endless jobs wait in wings for innovation-era-leaders
So what’s preventing 15 million US citizens from work?
That answer’s simple – current leaders hold back prosperity as they ignore innovative IQ. See Braden Kelly’s videoed discussion with me about stoking innovation.
The fix takes far more than creating new jobs, and involves a rejuvenated look at workplace practices rooted in the brain chemistry of forgiveness, for instance. From a brain’s perspective, the process of changing conventions or rewiring from toxins of worplace in-fighting and accusations, can be brutal for adults since learning requires massive rewiring of vast cortical connections. To cultivate winning leader approaches is to see how these new skills are in plastic competition with neural networks that developed deep leader ruts to get us into current quagmires financially and emotionally.
Without doubt, organizational change can appear daunting at first. Those who lead even one neuro-discovery from those introduced here though, already cracked open a window for rejuvenation and excellence that will usher in jobs well-fitted to lead in a new era.
The result?
Watch hope diminish as Standard & Poor’s lowers US credit rating. See stocks plummet weekly. Listen to news that wars rage senselessly as entire nation wires daily for war and violence.
Good news? This nation craves a rejuvenated and robust leadership. Individuals and organizations long for leaders who outsmart fiscal disasters. Leaders who risk to reconfigure broken health care systems, and challenge bankers to loosen public purse strings before we choke.
Leaders too Often Prevent the Change they Crave
Before a nation can create new jobs, effective leaders will shape innovative practices with, and not for, their workforce. That turnaround requires a focus on how brains holds people back and how they’re equipped to propel innovation forward. In spite of many mysteries that still occur in the quadrillion synapses within a human brain, nevertheless wonderful benefits await skilled facilitators, who use brainpowered tools to pre-empt or curtail yesteryear’s broken practices.
Brain facts below suggest how leaders transform workplace toxins into tone tools. Diversity and talents need not be buried by bullies, cynics or naysayers, if facilitators put into place one or two of the following brain related strategies to engage curiosity. How so?
The Cynic in Few Tends to Tank Innovative Talents in Many
Most organizations either propel talents forward or tank them due to their awareness levels of the following brain operations:
1. Amygdala for the cynic is that tiny sac of neurons that remains agitated most of the time, overheats easily, and triggers turmoil as an emotional pattern. Tools to tame your amygdala, include creating a culture of gratitude by rewarding people who inspire and support others.
2. Cortisol releases from cynics like falls at Niagara, as its potent chemical slams people into stress that shrinks human brains. Tactics to counter that cortisol surge, include facilitating a jointly created program to help workers identify and deal with stress.
3. Neuron pathways for cynics create disagreeable expressions of gloom, and habitual synapses can reshape moods or jade perspectives into permanent problems over time. Since, all today’s actions shape tomorrow’s mental wiring, encourage natural light and a healthy setting and stokes positive moods at work, for instance.
4. Plasticity rewires the cynic’s brain nightly for angry responses, and deep seated frustrations. Outwardly, poor tone packs punches that cripple opportunities to prosper. Rewire against cynicism by doing its opposite, and teaching positive ways a brain changes itself based on risk-taking innovation, since every action you take today helps to reshape the brain as you sleep tonight.
5. Dendrite brain cells connect negativity to negativity in cynics’ minds, and this regenerates mental stagnation not seen in the curious. Practice one positive act and watch chemical and electrical activity reboot you mentally for more of the same.
6. Basal ganglia, with its propensity to default back to ruts, stores and replays worst habits of cynics till others can cite their complaints by heart. Discuss and plan deliberate actions against racism, sexism and other poisonous practices picked up and played routinely without much thought.
7. Working memory sits unused and often remains mute for the cynic, who finds no need for mental equipment that prospers the curious or leaps into action for solution bound minds. Focus on facts that build concrete solutions and working memory tools spring into action to solve complex problems out of bounds to the cynical mind.
8. Brain chemicals refuel wretched moods in cynics, with decreased natural drugs for well being, and increased hormones for negative behavior. Cynicism blocks serotonin, tools presented in this article will stoke this molecule of happiness and stir up chemicals that synapse for growth.
9. Serotonin sinks lower in the mind of the cynic, leaving the brain without resources against anxiety, disquiet, anger, or conflict at work. Since each cynical act can lower a brain’s natural serotonin supplies, increase serotonin through healthy foods, exercise, and many behaviors that spike sincere satisfaction. (Check out Dr. Robyn McMaster’s article at http://twurl.nl/eautmm to fuel your brain as you fill your plate. )
10. Brainwaves of cynics rewire daily for more cynical performances. Organized by a hierarchy, electrical waves control how neurons communicate for better or for worse, and cynical forces can surge a brain’s circuitry for negative outcomes.
Sadly toxic tone quickly fills the vacuums when talents go ignored in any organization. Awareness helps here. Share the above list of toxins, and watch workplace tone tactics replace harmful toxins in favor of leading innovative talents.
Growth opportunities?
Brainpowered tools below ignite curiosity and spark innovative IQ to:
1). Develop new talents. Drop mentoring for mindguiding practices that both teach and learn from others. With similarities no longer promoted, multiple intelligences spring into action.
2). Engage whole brain assets. Capitalize on both left and right brainpower, when you risk solutions that bring together offerings from both arts and sciences.
3). Integrate alliances. Pose 2-footed questions across isolated silos in ways that cross-pollinated curious teams and motivate solutions together.
4). Drop best practices in favor of play – along with humor – added daily to improve one routine practice.
5). Demonstrate ethics in action through what if … questions that build integrity and ratchet up your bottom line?
6). Transform meetings into interactive roundtables where you listen with your brain, and stoke opposites to ignite innovative ROI.
7. Foster workplace wellness where venting toxins turn into tone that celebrates goodwill across differences.
8). Cultivate caring communities where challenges and heated competition trigger trust and curiosity to build prototypes across disagreements.
9). Toss performance reviews and shift focus from workplace weaknesses to intelligence-fair appraisals
10). Blend hard and soft skills into smart skills that double as brainpowered tools. Rewire your brain to win far more – based on skills from its fertile areas.
Opposites ignite growth
Successful assimilation requires deliberate and serious actions across opposite directions – for a very different kind of leadership to emerge. Neuro discoveries hold keys to make it happen. The problem’s less about what’s happening to us, and more about how we lead solutions in response.
When gridlock and compromise become leading actions, wealth and new opportunities follow.
Perhaps Bach-y-Rita’s brilliant story, relates best how brainpowered tools build life-changing turnarounds for impacting broken systems. One man changed an entire health industry’s views on brains’ ability to grow and change. How so?
Bach-y-Rita’s risked career and reputation to bring hope
Brains change daily the father of neuroplasticity, Paul Bach-y-Rita proved as he converted life-changing defeat, into mind-bending neuro discoveries. After his 65 year old father’s crippling stoke and despair after a month’s therapy and little progress, medical experts suggested placing him in an institution as the only choice.
It’s hard to see possibilities in their collective doom: Brains cannot repair themselves every medical leader argued. Nothing can help a stroke victim walk or talk again, became their mantra. Rather than watch his father slip further from his past as respected professor at City College in NY, Paul brought his Papa back to Mexico, and restored his health.
He used his talent to turn problems into possibilities. He leveraged enormous risks needed, and simply taught his aging father to crawl again.
Onlookers ridiculed every risk he took, and main steam medicine mocked him in the media. Meanwhile, his father leaned against walls to support his limp shoulder, as he inched along on all fours for months. To motivate growth, his sons created marble games to play on the floor that required reach and movement. Cynics in medical schools warned of wasted time, and neighbors criticized the Bach-y-Rita family when their papa crawled outside, saying, “The boys are treating this old man like a dog.”
When progress began to show, Paul studied how the brain reorganized itself to take over damaged parts.
The upshot?
The elderly Bach-y-Rita returned to teach at City College in New York, at 68 - three years after his stroke. Brainpowered tools improve difficult areas, reshape prosperity, and rewire a focus to win. These tools – crafted from new neuro discoveries - support action and ensure persistence on the other side of loss. Sound like qualities we crave in new era leaders?
Paul Bach-y-Rita’s future leadership in the medical field was shaped by the way he seeing with our brains and not our eyes, as his papa’s brain reorganized itself for new directions. Winning the highly respected title – Father of Plasticity - he went on to explain research behind key areas of plasticity – or the brain’s ability to rewire and find solutions when cynics and naysayers shout words of doom and disaster. Brainpowered tools often extend beyond organizational solutions, and into designing prototypes. But what about cynics on the sidelines, such as an entire medical field with endless might and much money?
10 Brain Facts Trigger Brainpowered Tools
Leaders increase talent growth for a new era, based on how they:
- Engage opposing views to use more working memory rather than remain in ruts. Otherwise you default to the basal ganglia - the mental storehouse that replays past tone habits. See video below – to view tug-of-war between brain’s basal ganglia to cling to past era - and working memory to generate innovative talents for the future one.
- Access both left and right brainpower, to locate diverse pathways across isolated silos or departments. Combine hard and soft skills, for instance, or tame the amygdala to calm that seat of emotions when it heats during challenges.
- Run from stress and other workplace toxins, since stress literally shrinks brains, and its cortisol chemicals crush progress. Laugh at the little things instead, and increase serotonin the chemical for well being, by using good tone.
- Question to stoke multiple intelligence responses in ways that increase curiosity. Gain innovative outcomes in novel ways to ratchet up workplace IQ for ongoing inventions.
- Cultivate interpersonal intelligence initiatives, especially in volatile markets, by meeting diverse customer needs through stoking more synergy between arts and sciences.
- Activate risk’s neural pathways for new initiatives to spark the kind of chemical and electrical circuitry that gains well being and higher productivity from all workers.
- Mindguide -or mutually mentor others - in ways that teach as you learn. Retain more by doing than by listening. Grow brain cells for mindguiding by teaching and learning in tandem.
- Facilitate improved individual and organizational DNA by creating more interactive meetings and developmental sessions where folks explore new ideas that offer the kind of hope triggered by the trapped Chilean miners, before being rescued in October, 2010.
- Reflect with people rather than assess or critique their weaknesses in conventional ways. Acknowledge more success and trigger change with mutual dividends through the wonders of neuro-plasticity, that reconfigures brains daily.
- Propose solutions for problems raised at work, and model brainpowered leadership rather than venting - which merely creates neuron pathways for more of the same.
I like this. I also think it can be combined with Shawn Achor's "The Happyness Advantage", an interesting read on attitude.
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Yet it differs from Mita new neuro discoveries and brainpowered approach in a few key areas. Brainpowered approaches integrate reason, logic and emotions across both sides of the brain, for instance. Practical workplace tools draw on new neuro and cognitive findings. They're also tested in a lifetime of research and observation, across multiple cultures - to see why the brain's chemical and electrical circuitry is central to innovative growth.
Sadly, such tools are noticably missing at workplaces that hold back entire nations. Dozens of people emailed after the recent post A BRAIN ON FORGIVENESS to remind me of the fact that it takes new mental tools to shift focus from dead end careers to endless opportunities. See Brain chemistry of Pardon. -- A Brain on Forgiveness.
See - http://t.co/BPNWSElS
What do you think?
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Hi Ellen, after a long time I am coming back. Very busy since last few months. Your hack is interesting. I particularly agree with your solution 1 - "develop new talents". In my hack, I am proposing that talented people should be given ownership rights as talent is scarcer than capital. You are focusing on Brain, I am focusing on human body functioning. Complementary thoughts. I encourage you to read my hack "The Body Corporate". Let me know your thoughts
Best regards, Chary
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Without the arts we focus on one side of the brain only - and at times I hear people call for more science and technology in ways that avoid brilliance of added arts. Your hank on the body corporate presents a far wider picture of the possibilities for organizations, than more narrow views that ignore an entire side of the brain.
Chary, you're likely aware of new discoveries about what it means to grow more IQ - and these factor in many of the steps you suggest here. The current view of brain includes mind, soul, heart, and emotions and these all deeply connect with body in a holistic snapshot of humans. The key is to roll discoveries into actions at work and that too has begun to happen:-)
The interconnection is our key to moving organizations forward for a new era.
Best,
Ellen
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