Discussed in this Video:

  1. Rational brain is overrated
  2. Do the most important task first thing of the day
  3. Focus on what is important
  4. Using Will Power
  5. Chunk big ideas into smaller ideas
  6. Associations
  7. Use your visual senses
  8. The Director in your mind
  9. The importance of Your social status

How to handle pressure:

  1. Suppress feelings and emotions – although this is probably the worst way to handle pressure
  2. Express your emotions – get your emotions to come out
  3. Cognitive change
    1. Label it – Label the feeling so that you can trigger activity in PFC. 
    2. Reframing – Re-frame the situation differently
    3. Reposition – think about it from a different perspective
  4. Reorder your values – The most potent way to handle pressure. 

 

Your Brain at Work by David Rock

The biggest premise behind this book is if you know your brain, you can actually transform your performance. You need to understand how your brain works. What is the structure of the brain in order to get the very best out of yourself? The subtitle of the book is Strategies overcoming distractions, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long. Great book on the idea of how to get ourselves to work at our very best by understanding how our brain works.

The first idea, the first really important understanding that we have to have is that a rational brain is rather overrated because it does not have the strength that we think it does. Our conscious doesn’t really have the strength that we think it does so we need to use it properly. If you use it properly, we can really command, we can really get a great performance out of ourselves. We can really get ourselves to do our very best. But if we don’t use it properly, we’re going to be in trouble. Now the reason is that the rational brain is a very limited resource and precious in the sense that throughout the day, it runs, it’s a very expensive to use it. It consumes a lot of energy so your brain constantly is trying to find ways to not use the rational, the prefrontal cortex and all that stuff.

So how do you get around to getting the best out of your brain? One of the first things you can do is to make sure that you eat the frog. What that means is that, this is in reference of course to the book Eat the Frog by Brian Tracy. The idea is do the most important thing, first thing of the day because that is when your rational resources are very much available to your cognitive resources are available to you and you can spend all the energy on your most important task. So eat the frog, really important idea here.

The other idea comes from the book Effective Executive another book that we’ve done a summary on talks about one of the most important ideas in Effective Executive says that we need to focus on what is most important to us. Focus and not switch all the time. Don’t just go around switching between task to task to task. Switching consumes a lot of energy in our cognitive part of the brain and in the rational part of the brain and hence it’s very expensive for our brain. We do it because we get this dopamine rush every time we change it but we lose all the context we lose all the processing we have done in the past and so switching is not necessarily a good idea. So focus single-mindedly don’t multi-task, don’t try to do double triple tasking at the same time. Focus, concentrate. That’s what Peter says, he wasn’t a brain scientist but he is saying the same things. So really important to understand that a lot of people are talking about very similar things.

Another thing is the idea of will power just that we shouldn’t be using all our cognitive resources in order to do tough things all the time. We shouldn’t be using our cognitive resources to establish the wrong habits. Instead, the best use of our rational conscious mind is to establish the key stone habits because the habits are established in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain where it doesn’t need as much cognitive resources, conscious resources, and rational resources in order to do one thing. Once something becomes a practice and it goes into your basal ganglia, you don’t need to spend that much energy, and thinking on it. as you probably know your habits become so much a part of you that you don’t probably think about them before you do it, you just go wake up and brush your teeth and maybe you go take a shower and do all those things. You don’t even consciously process those things because they become a part of your basal ganglia. And your basal ganglia is a very optimized structure of the brain and allows you to even inculcate the toughest part of things into your life by the way of practice.

Another important idea comes from GTD, Getting Things done by David Allen where he says don’t use the mind as a storage device. Really important to understand, we really shouldn’t be using our mind to store ideas. We should be using our mind as a way to actually create ideas. To have ideas and the more we try to store stuff in it, the more it becomes a junkyard and we really don’t have enough access to our resources because we are constantly storing junk into it. Okay I should remind myself do this, for picking up the dry cleaning, to pick up the grocery. Instead we should not be using our brain for that purpose. Those should be some external note taking system or something.

Another big one is in order to remember something or improve our memories what are the different things that we can do? One of the things that we can do is chunk. Now that is what we do here in these summaries. We try to chunk down the big ideas into bigger and bigger ideas so that you can remember one big concept right away and then the chunking becomes really simple of course in these visuals you see the chunking happen where we go from your brain at work to conscious and rational understanding and then chunking down and then chunking down even further. Chunking down really helps our brain simplify things. Another thing to do is associations. If you can associate something with something we are going to do a summary of Moonwalking with Einstein which is all about how to improve our memory how to improve what we can remember and the associations are so critical in making that happen which is why all these things will help you remember the key ideas in this book much better than if they were just stand alone concepts. Another way to remember better is to use your visual senses. Of course that is why we are doing these videos, these mind maps, make it as visual as possible so you can locate them, spatially see them, you can understand what is going on in the visual realm as well as the auditory realm.

Okay so we talked about the rational brain we talked about the conscious brain now let us talk about when it comes to problem solving, what is the challenge? The big challenge that we have is that the rational brain is overrated. It is a very small piece of the whole puzzle. Your subconscious mind is a way bigger piece of the puzzle. If the rational brain was the size of a cubic feet, then your subconscious mind is the size of Milky Way. That is how big it is, how powerful it is, how strong it is. How we just underestimate the power of the subconscious mind and the reason why we do that is because our rational is talking all the time. It is constantly active. And the amplitude of the frequency of the rational drowns out the lower level amplitude of the subconscious mind. That is why a lot of times you probably realize that you get your best ideas when you are walking or when you are in the shower or when you are playing or something because that is when your rational mind is completely quiet down and now the ideas from your subconscious can really emerge and give you the key ideas that you need in order to make progress.

Another big idea is something I really did not understand at first but when I got it, boy it really changed a lot of the ways I understood things. So this is the idea of the limbic arousal. What that means is that we have this limbic brain in our systems. The small limbic brain which is all about its major function is to keep us alive. So it takes us away from the things we fear and towards the things that could be rewarding to us. Whenever we are in a situation where there is a big fear our limbic brain activates. Once we get into limbic arousal, our prefrontal cortex is not as active anymore. The prefrontal cortex does not have the neurons available to do its computation. So once it is feeling the fear or the excitement, we cannot think clearly that is why we say when we are under pressure we don’t think clearly when we talk about players, this player is really clutch, can perform under pressure, or chokes. What that really means is in a situation, for example in the super bowl a few years ago when Peyton Manning was facing the Seahawks, you might have noticed that a lot of people say he choked. What does it mean that he choked? Well what happened was that the situation was so big, the great reward that was in front of him was so big that his limbic brain was in arousal and what that caused was that his prefrontal cortex his rational brain didn’t work as well. It was shutting down or it wasn’t performing at its very best. And when that happens once your rational brain is not able to do its very best, you can’t really perform at your very best. There is a curve that defines how we perform with respect to the arousal in our lives. Don’t get me wrong, we do need a little bit of arousal in order for ourselves to perform at our very best. We need to gain the excitement, the challenge. But too much excitement, challenge, pressure, fear, and the potential of a reward, all those things can hijack it. It is like an inverted U curve. Your performance will increase as a function of arousal only until a certain point and then it will go down. So you have to be careful your performance will go down a certain point if your limbic arousal is too much. There is an understanding that at some point the limbic arousal would be good, beyond that, it is too much. Now how do we handle pressure? Understanding that this situation, we will be in situations in life where we will have high pressure, challenged, things will be on the line, might feel like we are choking, or where we have to be clutch. How do you handle these situations? Well the first way, a lot of the ways people try to do it is to suppress their feelings, suppress their emotions. And that thing does not work. Suppressing your emotions is probably one of the worst ways to handle problems like this when there is limbic arousal when the pressure is on you.

Another way to do it is to express your emotions. Now that is a little bit better than suppressing your emotions because it gets the emotions out once you’ve expressed them and it allows you to quiet down that limbic side a little bit. But the third way to handle pressure is cognitive change. There are three different ways to do cognitive change. One of which is to label something. Let us say you are in a situation. I’ll take a really funny simple example, let us say you are a guy and you see this beautiful girl and you go and you have to talk to her but suddenly you are now choking because there is so much pressure because the reward is so high, then suddenly you feel fearful, scared, or nervous and all those feelings come over you. First thing you can do to avoid that is to label it. Just say I am feeling anxious. Just say it in your head. What that does is as soon as you start to use labels and words. The words are a language of the prefrontal cortex, they are not the language of the limbic system. So as soon as you start using these words let us say I am feeling anxious I am feeling nervous, suddenly the prefrontal cortex now is starting to kick in, it is starting to get into action. And it allows you to cool down the limbic system. Another and better way to deal with cognitive change is reframing. Framing the whole situation very differently. Various ways in doing reframing is to just say this is normal. A lot of guys feel this. This is the normal humanity, most guys feel pressure, and most guys feel nervous when they are going up to a beautiful girl. That is just the way life is. It’s okay it is no big deal. Everyone is going through it. I am not special, it is normal. Once you do that your limbic brain starts to subside and your prefrontal cortex takes over. Another way to do it is to reposition it. So instead of thinking about it all from your perspective, you now position yourself and start thinking enough of the situation from the girl’s perspective. Maybe you think, hey, that girl probably she has been single for so long she is looking for someone and she really hopes that someone will come up and talk to her maybe I should do that. So as soon as you reposition your thinking, you go from thinking about yourself to thinking from someone else’s perspective. All those different perspective. Once you reposition your thinking, it really engages your prefrontal cortex. It allows you to do better thinking. Another way to do it is to reorder your values. This is one of the most powerful ways to handle your pressure. What happens is when you reorder your values there is a huge emotional discharge and a huge availability of neurons to your prefrontal cortex. Now what does it mean to reorder your values? In life you value certain things in different ways. Maybe in this way you are trying to think of going up to this beautiful girl, maybe you are scared that what would my friends think, her friends think, what if I fail? So that is what you are valuing right now. The idea of what you and her friends think, what would the people around me think, that is your current value system. What if you change your value system? Let us see if I can do it. Or if someone says come on man let us see if you can do it. Or something on the lines of changing the value from saying someone else think you are failing to challenging yourself. Now you are valuing this challenge. The value in question is are you a courageous person to do this? Initially the value you have given to this whole thing was what other people would think. Now the value that you really care about is your own courage, your ability to take courage in the presence of something fearful or something as simple as a beautiful girl. So really important ideas in reframing in order to get cognitive change to handle pressure. Maybe you have to go through this a couple of times to really get it but a really important concept here.

Now let us talk about probably the most important lesson from this whole book which is understanding that you have what is called the director. More importantly, a part of you that is able to think about your thinking. Your metacognition, your mindfulness. Being aware of your thinking, your cognitive activities. That is so powerful because once you pay attention to your director, it gets stronger and stronger. Once you pay attention to what it is you are thinking, how your brain and how things are changing, all these things become easier. It is easier to handle the limbic arousal, solve problems, understanding that you are running out of your subconscious resource, you are running low on will power, or that you are not able to chunk. All these things come as a result of understanding that you have a director, this part in you that can help you in being more mindful and hence get the best out of yourself. How do you strengthen your director? How do you get your metacognition abilities, mindfulness abilities are really at the very best. The very best ways to improve your metacognition, to improve your mindfulness are meditation and breathing techniques are by far the best ways to overall improve the personality of your director and hence, improve your overall brain performance.

Now before we close there is one important idea that we also want to touch on which is the brain is worried about your overall social well-being. It thinks about it, it is constantly assessing situations and one of the most important things it is worried about is your status around the people around you and everything else. And what happens is when you are around people a lot of times you find yourself in situations where you feel like you have lower status and they have higher status and hence things are not working for you. But what it is saying is find situations where you have status, find the niche where you are the best. Find your high status niche and you should operate in that domain because that will give the very best. That is what will allow you to get the very best out of yourself and will get you the very best results in your life. Another way to feel high status in life is just to feel better, high status than where we were yesterday. That is just a simple hack in order to get your brain to feel a higher status. Now the problem on the other side of the spectrum is when we lower someone else’s status by saying like you don’t understand you are not good enough, that is a big problem because as soon as you say this, they somehow associate the idea that this is all coming to my existence. We are talking about I am lower status than you are hence my existence is at stake. People get limbic arousal any time someone challenges their status by saying they are not good enough.

So let us wind down this discussion, let us go back to the most important idea in this book which is that in order to get the very best from our brains, we need to understand the performance of our brains, and in order to understand that, the best way to do it is to improve the performance of our director.

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