How you’d explain it to grandma at Thanksgiving dinner
“This is your brain. This is your brain at work.” (Any children of the 80s here?) Author David Rock has created a surprisingly engaging mash-up of neuroscience and workplace consulting: it explores how the brain operates, how it impacts our work, and how that knowledge can help us improve in a professional setting. The author explains the neuroscience behind common workplace issues, and it does so by employing a highly relatable narrative trick: it’s the easy-to-read story of two working parents navigating a series of work challenges throughout the day. He offers strategies on making decisions, managing distractions, staying cool under pressure, collaborating with colleagues, and more.
The brain is an impressive organ, but it has limitations and can be easily overwhelmed. By understanding the brain’s limitations and how these limitations affect our work, we can make simple tweaks to improve our own actions and our interactions with others and become more efficient and effective in the workplace. It’s hard to argue with science!
If you do one thing based on this read . . .
Make it a priority to plan and prioritize first thing in the morning - even before checking your email - because it’s an energy-intensive task. Schedule the tasks that require the most attention (including planning, problem solving, and communicating) for when you feel fresh and alert.
“While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before.”
Three Clear Takeaways
Even the greatest minds aren’t able to focus on more than one conscious task at a time. The book referenced a study showing that when people do two cognitive tasks at the same time, their cognitive capacity can drop from the level of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. That’s not ideal when you’re working, particularly if accuracy is a crucial part of your job! Neuro-hack: If you notice that you are trying to do two things at once, pause and slow down. If you insist on multitasking, make sure that only one task requires active thinking while the other is an automatic routine.
Individuals learn and grow much more from finding their own insights than from receiving others’ suggestions. Individuals are driven by several domains of human experience, including, among others, status and autonomy. When a supervisor sees that her employee is struggling and offers a solution to a problem, it often has the unfortunate consequence of threatening the employee’s sense of both his status and autonomy. If, on the other hand, an individual is given the opportunity to come up with his own solution, he will feel a rise in her status level, a stronger sense of autonomy, and a stronger sense of certainty in the solution. Neuro-hack: Look for opportunities to help people quiet their minds and stretch their thinking so that they can come to their own insights (coaching is a great tool for doing this!).
Cognitive reappraisal can effectively reduce the impact of emotional situations. Reappraisal is the idea that while you can’t control what happens to you, you can control how you view and interpret the meaning of a situation. Using reappraisal can help you to stay calm and regulate your emotions. Neuro-hack: Try one of these four main types of reappraisal:
Reinterpreting - deciding that a threatening event is no longer threatening (e.g. deciding that your upcoming presentation in front of the company is not dangerous, but rather exciting)
Normalizing - telling yourself that an emotion is normal and thus can be explained (e.g. reminding yourself that everyone feels overwhelmed when they take on a new role)
Reordering - considering and tweaking the values that you ascribe to a situation (e.g. rather than focusing on how much you enjoy working by yourself, instead considering the positives of working collaboratively so that the brain places a higher value on working with others)
Repositioning - looking at a situation from other perspectives (e.g. viewing a work conflict from the viewpoint of your coworker)