I’ve been doing a course based on neuroscience recently, as I am more and more curious about some of the coaching techniques I have been taught in the past, and why they work. I’m intrigued as to what the brain is doing, and indeed it’s quite fascinating.
Did you know that 90% of our mind is operating at a subconscious level, and only 10% is our conscious mind? And that many of our subconscious decisions are based on beliefs that we developed by around age 8? So when we think we are very ‘logical’ in our decision-making it’s not quite true. A lot of our decisions are based on strong beliefs which are formed in the past, and therefore are not in line with current thinking, potentially. Wouldn’t it be great, therefore, if we could bring some important areas of the subconscious into our conscious mind? It’s only there that we can ‘control’ and work on them.
Before I connect this with some of what I see coming out of the pandemic, there are a few other interesting facts I have discovered. I have believed for a long time that the mind is easily trained and by repetition you can convince it of what you need to – in order to think more positively, achieve your goals, etc. What I now understand from neuroscience is that it takes hearing or seeing something 66-67 times to start believing whatever that thought or image is. This ‘neuroplasticity’ is where you consciously create new neural pathways by visual or verbal repetition. So it’s not a lot of hocus pocus: it’s about breaking existing neural connections and creating new ones, seemingly.
In the context of the pandemic and whatever the ‘next normal’ will be, it’s important to understand this on a number of levels.
When faced with situations we don’t like because they do not fit our current subconscious beliefs (‘in order to be happy I need to go on a foreign holiday each year’, ‘I cannot work well from home – I need to be in the office’, ‘I cannot bear the thought of having to commute again and go back into the office’, ‘it’s not as effective training a new person in treasury when they are not sat next to you’), beliefs often not based on fact per se, maybe the solution is to ‘re-prime’ our brain in order to make things easier on ourselves? An effective way to do this is to write down the new ways of thinking you would like to adopt: the more positive thinking which will help you, i.e. ‘I don’t need to have holidays abroad to be happy’, ‘I actually can work well from my home office’, ‘I look forward to going into the office sometimes in the future’, ‘I can train people effectively outside the office, given due thought and care’.
If you take some background music that is suitably reflective, play it in the background and then record yourself on your phone via a voice memo saying these new thoughts, you can play back your recording to yourself morning and evening, and within a month you should see a change in your life and beliefs. You have taken control by bringing these thoughts into your conscious mind, and then establishing them as new neural pathways in the subconscious.
Two other interesting facts: if you write down your script by hand rather than by typing, it is a more effective method, as the act of writing is more powerful than typing, apparently, and if you record yourself, and listen then to yourself, it is far more effective than listening to someone else say the same words.
Another useful approach I have found in the past is saying a quick ‘mantra’ of the thing you want to believe, as if it is the current truth, and repeat this over and over whilst brushing your teeth, sitting in a car, or on public transport. We can use our spare capacity in those moments to re-prime our brains, and get ‘with’ our current and desired reality more quickly.
