Guest AuthorRaja Jamalamadaka
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You are currently using a tiny part of your brain potential – Here’s how to use it full potential for professional and personal success

By | Raja Jamalamadaka | Industry speaker | Neuroscience coach | Marshall Goldsmith awardee | Author | LinkedIn Top voice | IIT | Harvard

All of us have a brain (at least in its physical sense). While a lot has been written about the body, the brain continues to be a cryptic organ without a user manual. As a result, most of us use the three pound gorilla in our heads without its full understanding, leading to sub optimal results. Our brains can deliver a lot firepower if used optimally – let’s start with a few areas.

Brain potential and Sleep

Sleep? Aren’t we talking brain potential? Isn’t sleep “a necessary evil” before your brain can show its true potential?  

If you are thinking on these lines, know this – the potential of your brain – and yourself – is in direct proportion to how rested and relaxed your sleep is.   

Here is a scan of the brain while you are sleeping.

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Notice that the brain while asleep (REM) is much more active (red color) than when awake. During sleep, your brain seems to working a lot harder when you sleep than when you are awake. What is your brain doing when you sleep?

The brain uses the first part of your sleep to consolidate memories and the latter part to improve your creativity. If you care about strong memory, focus and attention, or being a creative “out-of-the-box-thinker”, go ahead – give your brain a good sleep. The key to using your intelligence during the day is to sleep well at night.

How do you get adequate sleep?

1.      Before going to bed, avoid reading official mails, debating with colleagues, solving work issues, having caffeine/energy drinks. Keep electronic gadgets in a different room –your cellphone should never double up as your alarm.

2.      Instead, read a positive book, meditate, take a shower, read stories to your kids, recall episodes you need to be thankful for.

Here’s a more detailed writeup on sleep.

Brain and Productivity

 Now that your brain has had some great sleep, it is time you focused on getting your day running smoothly. The challenge? Twenty hours seems too less with so much happening.  Since the number of hours are unlikely to change anytime soon, the only thing you can change is your productivity.   How do you do that?

The human brain operates by generating waves called brain waves. There are three primary waves – alpha, theta and beta. Productivity is the fine art of matching the frequency of the tasks you undertake during the day to those of the brain. Said differently, you need to know which task to undertake in which brain state if you want to work at optimal productivity and enjoy your life.

Mornings are more suitable for giving yourself positive assertions, heading to the gymnasium, taking a mindful walk, enjoying your coffee, planning your day or meditating. Mornings are the worst time to check your office mails.

Use Breakfast, lunch, and breaks between meetings as stress busters and avoid discussing work related subjects – working lunches are worst productivity killers.

Evenings are best suitable for walking your pets, playing with your kids, or bonding with your non-work friends or reading.

Most people simply don’t respect the brain and force the right task at the wrong brain time. Is it any wonder that with each passing day, people are getting busier while achieving less leading to loss of fulfilment in life?  

 Here’s a more detailed writeup on how to manage your day to ensure healthy work life balance and be productive best everyday.

Brain and creativity

“Think out of the box. Stay agile. Wear your creative hat.”  

Unless you have been living in a cave, you very likely heard variants of these statements at some point in your career. How exactly do you “think out the box” and come up with unconventional ideas? Let’s first understand the term “thinking out of the box” or “creativity”.

 “Creativity or thinking out of the box is the fine art of creating associations between disparate pieces of information tucked away in various parts of the brain to create previously non-existent solutions to challenges we face as we go through our life.”

“Associations” – that’s all there is to creativity. It is obvious that creativity is not a “Einstein-ian” level skill that you are either born with or not – it is all about using the brain right.   

How do create these associations without visiting a brain surgeon? Two simple techniques help –

1.      Change daily routines – Since we are creatures of habit and we are habitually not programmed to think differently, change your daily routines to break these habits.

a.      Change your simple daily routines to enrich experiences. Watch films of a different genre, learn a new language, change your music playlist, try a different item on the menu of a restaurant you won’t otherwise visit, take a different route to work. These simple acts don’t periodically will fire up your creativity.

2.      Develop a hunger for knowledge – The more the data in your brain, the higher the possibility of forming connections between them and greater the possibility of getting creative.

a.      Read books, watch videos, cultivate an accomplished industry mentor and learn something new by enrolling for a course.

Read – The science of creativity and how you – and anyone – can think out of the box.

Staying Positive

Bill Gates reads every day. So does Zuckerberg. Every single successful person seems to be reading … EVERYDAY. Why? To stay positive. But why do such hugely successful people need reading – aren’t they already positive?  Here’s is the answer.

The brain is – for want a better word – a negativity detection machine.  Once ANY signal enters the brain, the FIRST filter it has to pass through is the negativity filter called amygdala (The positivity detection filter is way deeper). Even the slightest trace of negativity by this center is enough to send the brain into a tailspin. Worse, nature has positioned the inhibiting circuits in the brain at such powerful points in the brain circuitry that for the same signal strength, a negative inhibiting force is five times more effective than an excitatory signal.

The upshot of such a brain architecture? You are likely to REACT five time more to even the slightest perceived negative message than to a positive one. Said differently, you need nearly five times more positive reinforcements to counter the negativity in this world and just stay grounded. And you need that EVERYDAY.   

Motivation, inspiration, Positive mental attitude books, mentorship, coaching is necessary as much for Bill Gates and his ilk as for you and me.

So if you are on a daily dose of reading books, inspiring articles, motivating lectures, mentorship or coaching sessions, STAY ON.

Another important note here-

Assuming you hold a leadership position, do you want an engaged workforce in your organization? Message a positive point FIVE times before you can expect your staff to catch it (Use different channels like verbally in a meeting, then written on a blog, personally in a 1:1 and so on). Any less than FIVE and the brain’s negative circuitry will latch itself on to the surrounding rumors leading to a disengaged workforce.

Brain and Overthinking

Despite a good sleep, excellent productivity and great reading every day, you aren’t guaranteed a life of perpetual nirvana. Life bowls googlies often.

An unexpectedly frank feedback from your boss, smirks from office colleagues, Jeers from friends during a get-together, a poker-faced look on your partner’s face, queer looks faces of people as you enter the party – these are just some of the situations that lead people to a paralysis of analysis and an endless cycle of overthinking. What’s overthinking?  – a racing mind imagining endless possibilities, conjuring up scenarios, visualizing “solutions” or receding to a make-believe world with the result that the peace-of-mind is shattered. In most cases, all this creates non-existent new problems without solving the original challenge.  

Thinking and analyzing an episode isn’t always bad in itself. The challenge arises when you are unable to break the cycle – the original scenario keeps playing again and again, leaving you distressed, emotionally drained and at extremes, leaving you with mental health challenges.

Overthinking is the best way to damage your peace of mind and undo all the good work done by rested sleep, high productivity and reading book to stay positive. So how do you keep this beast at bay?

Practicing the 5-10-15 principle helps gain control over your Anterior Cingulate Cortex (the part of your brain responsible for overthinking) –

1.      5 minutes of expressing gratitude/praying

2.      10 minutes of meditation

3.      15 minutes of physical exercise

Here’s a more detailed article on why we overthink and how to overcome it.

Brain and stage fear

Rested sleep. Aligning works in line with brain waves leading to excellent productivity. Creative thinking. Reading everyday. A daily routine of “5-10-15”. You are a star employee.

The great asset that you are, your boss has now asked to make a presentation in front of a 500-strong audience. Sweating already?  Welcome to the club … You share company with the likes of Warren Buffet, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Julia Roberts, Winston Churchill.

 Why do we fear the stage so much? Because brain chemicals have coded two message into your genes – your code of survival.

1.      Message 1 ‘damage to social position or prestige translates into unpredictability, loneliness and perhaps even death

2.      Message 2 – Stage presentations and social gatherings are events where we can damage our social image.

Add the two together and you realize why stage fear is stronger than even death.    

Three things help manage stage fear–

1.      Audience: Your stage fear will go down in direct proportion to your familiarity and relatability to the audience.

2.      Setting: Your stage fear will reduce in proportion to the degree and closeness of practice to reality.

3.      Topic: Your anxieties will reduce in proportion to your interest in and prior subject matter expertise of the topic.

A few hacks like taking deep breathes, avoiding questions mid way through, controlling eye contact and visualization help a lot.

Read – Science-driven techniques to overcome stage fear.

Brain and story telling

Overcoming stage fear is one part of the hurdle – the best speakers are great story-tellers. How do you tell a great story?  

It turns that a great orator don’t just tell stories – they make it so relatable that they manage to light up maximum parts of audience’s brains. That is the secret of great communication.

Is there a formula for this? There is- it is called the principle of dramatic arc. Stories that follow these four principles of the dramatic arc work best to keep audience spellbound:

1.   Step 1: Start with something new and surprising, (the audience attention is caught)

2.   Step 2: Increase tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, (audience attention is sustained as more parts of brain get involved)

3.   Step 3: Then lead to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis (the audience deeply connects emotionally),

4.   Step 4: Once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself. (The audience is left with deep and lasting impact)

Read – How can you – like great speakers and master orators – tell stories that captivate the audience  

Brain and luck

So you have done everything right – well-slept, productive, creative, well-read, terrific story-teller who keeps overthinking at bay. All set?

Well, no one in the world can deny the role of luck – that four-lettered word that controls so much of our lives.

But wait a minute –  Isn’t luck outside control?

It turns out that luck is lot more scientific and a lot more dependent on the brain than you thought.

Nature has built the human brain with two primary motivations: either reduce pain (prevention focus) or increase pleasure (promotion focused). All actions undertaken by every human being throughout life are meant to fulfill these motivations. It is the proportion of promotion to prevention focus in an individual that decides the luck quotient – the higher the promotion focus, the more lucky the individual. The fine art of being in the right place at the right time is the art of increasing the proportion of promotion-focus in oneself.

Believe it nor not, not everyone needs to be born with these attributes – the attributes to get lucky can be cultivated.

How do you get lucky? Presence, preparation, partner and play and of course, perseverance.

Read – How did J.K. Rowling, Sundar Pichai and other successful people master the techniques of getting lucky by choice.

The brain is like any other organ in your body – use it the way nature has designed it to enjoy the optimal benefits resulting from using 100% of your brain potential. Relax as others marvel at your creativity, productivity – and your luck. 

I would love to hear your views. Please leave a comment in the comment box below so I can learn from your experience.

Republished with permission and originally published at Raja Jamalamadaka‘s LinkedIn

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