The Changing Brain
What exactly is neuroplasticity and why is it important for you and your team?
It’s likely that in school, we were all taught that your brain develops until your early 20s and at around the age of 25 your brain just stops growing. From 25 onward, you slowly start to lose brain cells and it’s all downhill from there. This is actually not true.
Over the last 40 years, we’ve discovered that the brain has the ability to grow new neurons, to learn and to restructure for our entire lifetime. This is neuroplasticity: the brain is in fact, not hardwired, but able to change and develop well into our later years. ‘Neuro’ comes from the word neuron (aka brain cell) and ‘plasticity’ comes from plastic, meaning ‘changeable, malleable, modifiable’.
What prompts our brains to change? Research shows that our brains change in response to thought, experience and mental activity: so pretty much everything! In fact, our brains are changing at every moment of the day. Every single experience and thought that we have changes the structure and functions of our brain.
Let us think of this concept in terms of work. Within the work ecosystem you are being reshaped with every one of your interactions, positive or negative. The type of work you are choosing to do and the amount of variety you have within your work tasks is reshaping your brain. The quality of relationships you have with your work colleagues and managers is rewiring your brain.
You have the choice of reshaping who you are at every moment. Thanks to our knowledge of neuroplasticity, we know that it is possible to become more creative, more innovative, reduce our self doubt, become more positive.. the list goes on. Turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks after all
So, how exactly can I use neuroplasticity to think and behave in new ways?
The first step is to discover your current ‘thinking patterns’ which are determining your decisions and actions. Exploring your thinking patterns can give you an objective assessment of the mechanisms working beneath the surface that may be causing you to self-sabotage your own success or take you closer to your goals.
Our thinking patterns are a reflection of the choices we made yesterday, in the last week, the last month and even the last few years. Most people are unaware of their thinking patterns because all of this thinking happens so quickly and automatically. We see it as our job to help you to develop better thinking patterns so you can work smarter and not harder.
Research has shown that human thinking patterns primarily fall under 4 different key thinking styles. Do you want to learn more about the different thinking styles?
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