What we need to know about the human brain.
Here is the Mind-food version of my most recent podcast from "The Human Experience" which you can listen to on Spotify-
If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, click here.
Hello everybody. I'm talking about a topic that I actually feel quite strongly about. If I sound a little intense or passionate, please bear with me.
You may or may not know that I did a bit of a survey during the week. I was trying to understand what maybe got in the way of people trying out life coaching and it was a really interesting response that I got, and I thought hmm maybe I need to do a little chat about what we all need to know about the human brain and so that is what this particular podcast is about. I hope you find it interesting.
It won't be the first time that you will have heard me say that our experience of life is created by thoughts and ideas that are triggered by our circumstances and the emotions that it creates for us. If we let our brain do whatever it wants with out supervision or guidance from our prefrontal cortex, then for sure we risk ending up with a life that looks very different to the one we've visioned for ourselves.
The problem is we are not taught that we need to supervise our own brains. That we are even in charge of our brains and not the other way around.
If you are a person who wants to make the most of your life, make the most of your time here on this earth, if it is a priority or one of your key values, then you are going to want to have the knowledge and understanding about how the human brain works. Then more than that, you're going to need to be able to take that knowledge and that information and use it to understand how your unique version of the human brain works, how to supervise it and manage it so that it serves you.
You might think that you already know that, or that you don't need it, because our brain manages us, right? We don't manage it. But I promise you, that is not true. What most people forget, and probably haven't even learnt or realised as children, is that our brain always needs supervision and management. It's always had it and without oversight, it is like a two year old with a knife who has no idea of the harm it can do.
You might try and argue that your brain has never been supervised or managed and you're doing okay. So why would you need to now?
As children, all of that supervision that you think your brain's never had comes from outside of us, from our parents, from our peers. They guide us. They manage our brains for us by telling us what to do, how to do it. They supervise us, and appropriately so, because we don't have the knowledge or the experience to be able to do that for ourselves as children.
In truth, our brain was always being supervised and managed until we became an adult.
So as babies, we are born with felt sense, instincts, a fully functioning primitive brain. Our modern brain, the prefrontal cortex is new. It's like a brand new hard drive, has the wiring and the template, but no content yet. As we begin to navigate the world, and you began using your brain, our own specific circumstances, our parents, our life experiences, get loaded on to it and makes it unique.
To develop the information needed to gain the skills you need for each phase of your life you had your parents, your peers as examples to watch and observe, to seek and question, to share information with, to encourage you and to let you know when you were moving in a direction that was not going to serve you.
We don't realize that they're doing that, but they are. It's kind of like having a personal 24 -7 life coach on tap, except that a professional life coach doesn't have any investment or any agenda. There's no conflict of interest. They have training, knowledge, and skills that our parents, family, teachers, and peers are unlikely to have.
Now our parents and our teachers and society and peers have a conflict of interest. They have an agenda, an investment in the outcome because how you think, feel and behave impacts them. They want you to be like them and for others to like you. You want to be like them because that's one of our core needs, an instinctive need we are born with, to experience a sense of belonging.
Now of course, eventually we get to a point where we are expected to be an adult, but we can't become adults by continuing to allow other people to decide how we think, what we do, what we should believe, what's right for us, or what we want. At some point we have to take that responsibility on for ourselves. We have to be willing to manage and supervise our own minds and yet it rarely happens because most of us don't even realize, that our brains were being supervised, that that's what our brains need.
We get to adulthood, and we think it's our brains that are managing us and that we can just trust our brain to make all the decisions and know all the choices and do the right thing. We haven't connected the dots that it's been supervised and guided by parents and peers. We don't even consider questioning what our brain is offering us. We question everyone else, what they say to us and what they think, but not ourselves.
On top of that, as children we are taught that adults should be able to make their own decisions, should know what they're doing and not need help. So it's like the blind leading the blind. It's like having someone show you how to ride, explaining and demonstrating it, but never actually letting you ride, then handing you the reins 15 years later and walking away expecting you to be able to ride the horse like they did, or even better than they did. Of course you needed explanation and demonstration, we needed those things and we also needed to be allowed to do it for ourselves with their help and guidance and support.
We would have benefited from understanding how our brains work and how we experience our life, the impact of our brain on that. Until you know that and can do it for yourself, if we go back to my riding analogy, we will simply never actually be able to ride safely because it's all just theory.
Now of course I was going to do a horse analogy, you know I love horses.
What you learn and the skills you gain, how you apply them and what you want for yourself, all of that gets coloured and filtered through the views and the desires of those who taught us who have been part of our journey up until this point.
They weren't trained, qualified life coaches, they were parents, they were family, they were friends, they were teachers and although they showed you the way, they didn't understand the human brain. Didn't know how it works, or how to manage it, in a way that allows us to create results. A way that allows us to make the most of this life.
That's a key benefit of life coaching. There is huge benefit to having someone, who knows and understands through experience, but when you add knowledge, qualification and training and then experience within that about the human brain, how it works and how to manage it, and there's no conflict of interest, it is life changing powerful.
Now at this point you might think well you know I've tried therapy and psychology and I've tried counsellors and none of it's really helped. Now I've done both, all of it you know and they are important resources but they are about helping you come to terms with your past and coping, they are not about giving you the skills to move forward.
They don't teach you how to manage your mind or how it works. Provide you with the skills., the knowledge about how it all intersects. Your feelings and your actions and how it all impacts results.
Life before coaching and life after coaching feels as different as night and day, it certainly did and still does for me.
So having the knowledge and the skills that allows you to retrain your own brain is the ultimate in self -help. The result is not having to keep dealing with the same unwanted experiences over and over again. It just gets easier and easier because your brain is now offering you thoughts and information that we've chosen for it with intention to help us live our best life.
Over time we get to spend less time having to supervise and manage our brain because we've actually recalibrated it to serve us, to help us thrive and not to just survive. Until we do this work we are literally, honestly, we're operating from a brain that has been taught and managed by someone else who was part of your supervision and management team growing up and if you're not living the life that you want, that vision that you had for yourself, then it's not serving you.
It is never too late to have a life that you really want or love and that you know you will be so glad you did and that you look back on with pleasure and pride.
Make this week your best week yet and let it move you towards the life you want and maybe used to dream of.
