Coaching the Brain

Practical Applications of Neuroscience to Coaching

Joseph O'Connor, Andrea Lages

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351403481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Everything we do, and sense, happens through our brain. In Coaching the Brain: Practical Applications of Neuroscience to Coaching, highly experienced coaches Joseph O'Connor and Andrea Lages ask and answer the question: 'How can we use our knowledge of the brain to help ourselves and others to learn, change, and develop? '.

This book will show you how to apply insights from the latest neuroscience research in a practical way, in the fields of personal development, coaching and cognitive therapy. Accessible and practical, it begins with an overview of how the brain works along with an explanation of how our brain changes due to our actions and thoughts, illuminating how these habits can be changed through neuroplasticity. Understanding the neuroscience of goals and mental models helps us to work with and change them, and clarity about emotions and the emotional basis of values can help achieve happiness. Most importantly, neuroscience illuminates how we learn, as well as the power of expectations. The book also explores the key lessons we can take from neuroscience for high performance and leadership. Eminently accessible, this book gives you new tools to help yourself and others create better futures. As a whole, the book will provide you with a new respect for the depth and complexity of your thinking and emotions.

Coaching the Brain: Practical Applications of Neuroscience to Coaching, with its clarity and practical application, will be essential reading for coaches in practice and in training, as well as leaders, coach supervisors and HR and L&D professionals, and will be a key text for academics and students of coaching and coaching psychology.

Chapter 1

Clay and flame

The brain is the soul’s fragile dwelling place.

William Shakespeare

Prologue

In December 2016, when we were in New York on holiday, we both had a single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scan. We were not ill; we wanted to take a closer look at how the brain worked and decided to start with the most available one – our own. A SPECT scan is an unusual experience. You stay still, moving as little as possible for about thirty minutes while three high-resolution rotating cameras circle your head and take pictures of your brain. These pictures are combined to make three-dimensional colour scans. SPECT scans don’t just show the structure of the brain, but they also show how it works – which areas work well, which areas are working hard (perhaps too hard) and which areas are not working hard enough.

How does it do this? The more blood flow, the more gamma rays are picked up by the camera. Areas with the most blood flow show up as most colourful. Areas with the least blood flow have the least radiation and are darker in the scans. We did two scans. One for the brain in resting state. The other the next day while we worked on a computerised test that demanded focus and concentration. The final scans look quite spectacular, rather like a picture of the earth from space, where the cities are brightly lit and stand out from the vast swathes of land with little or no light. The scans show the pattern – the lighter, the more activity; darker for those parts not so active. The contrast between the scans at rest and when concentrating shows what areas are working and how intensely.

Why did we do this? For the same reason, people take personality tests, intelligence tests or enneagrams – to discover more about ourselves. I (Joseph) looked at my scans afterwards with a sense of wonder. Here was a perspective I have never taken before, a new window on my world: how my brain is powering my thoughts, moods, feelings, dreams and nightmares. And the scans showed my brain was more active in the resting state than in the focus state. (That is not as bad as it sounds, the brain never rests; it is always up to something.)

These scans are only part of the story. There were interviews and questionnaires about lifestyle, goals, health, spiritual interests, sleeping patterns, social life and diet. The brain is involved in all of these, and all of these affect the brain. Finally, a doctor helped us interpret the results, put the scans in perspective and make recommendations. More of this anon. We had plenty of questions. If coaching changes people, it changes their brain. How?

We had started on a fascinating path that led (among other things) to this book.

Your brain

This book is driven by two questions:

1. How does our brain create the world we experience?
2. How can we use that knowledge to help ourselves and our clients to learn, change and be happier?

It has been said that if the brain were simple enough to be understood, it would not be sophisticated enough to meet the challenge of understanding itself. How can one and a half kilogram of pinkish, off-white matter, with the consistency of soft butter, create Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Taj Mahal, the Internet, supersonic air travel, CRISPR, Pokémon Go and spray-on hair?

We can’t answer that, but in this book, we will gaze down the glittering corridors of our brain to explore how it creates our wants, needs, habits, beliefs, joys and fears.

We will explore questions like:

1. How do we get angry at ourselves, argue with ourselves and deceive ourselves?
2. (And exactly who is deceiving who?)
3. How do we create and change habits?
4. Faced with myriad possibilities, how do we decide what to do?
5. What does it mean to trust someone?
6. How does our brain weave all the disparate pieces together to create such a seamless experience of the world?
7. There are answers in those glittering corridors that can help us with these questions.
8. This book brings neuroscience to help us understand our goals, values and beliefs as we experience them. Then, we can better understand ourselves and others, and lead a richer, more fulfilled life.

Your brain is incredibly complex. It is made up of 100 billion neurons or nerve cells (give or take a few), each with between 1,000 and 10,000 synapses, or connections, to other cells. The number of possible connections is greater than the number of particles in the known universe (roughly ten followed by seventy-nine zeroes). Your brain contains about 100,000 miles of blood vessels and does not feel pain or pleasure, although it generates the pain and pleasure you feel in the rest of your body. No brain – no pain. Everything we know about the world is through the brain. It controls your heartbeat, breathing, sleeping, waking, sexual energy and appetite. It directs and influences your thoughts, moods, memories, decisions and actions. The world of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell is put together seamlessly by the brain for our attention and entertainment. The amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to present this amazing son et lumiere show is hidden from us. Whatever is really out there, the world we perceive is created in our brain through billions of nerve cells, interweaving trillions of electrical and chemical signals, and then projecting the result ‘out there’ in a multisensory pageant. The world is how it is because we are who we are. We only perceive what our brain allows us to perceive.

We have the illusion that we control our decisions, and that we are the masters of our destiny. However, most of our thinking, feelings, decisions and actions are not under our conscious control. Our brain is like a magician – it hides things from us and foregrounds others. ‘It’ is the master of illusion, misdirecting our attention to create the reality we think we perceive.¹ As we go on through this book, we will see what this means in practice.

We must never forget our brain is embodied. It doesn’t command the body like a puppet master commands a marionette. It is an integral part of the body.² Nor does it have a monopoly on nerve tissue. The heart has over 40,000 neurons. The gut has 100 million neurons, and dozens of neurotransmitters, earning it the title of ‘The second brain’.³ And there is often a friendly rivalry between the two brains.

Metaphors of the brain

There are still many myths about the brain that should be laid to rest. The prime example is that the brain is a glorified computer.⁴ If the brain was a computer, it would work the same regardless of weather, emotional mood, surroundings and who turned it on. It would remember everything perfectly. (And it would crash if it tried to do two things at once, and the person would have to be rebooted.) But it doesn’t. It is affected by emotions, what other people are doing, and it has off days. The brain has no CPU – it operates more like a collection of independent apps forced into the same place. Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes compete and often interfere with each other.

Another widespread myth is that we only use a small percentage of our brain. We use all our brain most of the time and most of our brain all the time. Even when sleeping, the brain is active, often more active than when we are awake. The ten percent myth is useful to remind us that we have more potential than we think and can probably do better than we are doing, but this is the field of motivational psychology, not neuroscience.

Finally, there is also the enduring myth that the left side of the brain is the seat of rationality, like a university library, built on logic and order. The right side of the brain is zany and artistic; a college party with lots of music and everyone having a good time. There is the tiniest sliver of truth in this which we will explore later. Each hemisphere is good at some things, not so good at others, but they cooperate well. (For example, the parts dealing with language tend to be mostly in the left hemisphere.) There is revelry in the library and rationality in the party.

Coaching and neuroscience

Neuroscience is the study of the structure and function of the nervous system and brain and their relation to behaviour and learning. Cognitive neuroscience is the biology of mind, the connection between our nervous system and our thinking and behaviour. The brain is the principal part of the nervous system, and here, we will focus on how the brain works and the applications for coaching.

Neuroscience gives an extra vital perspective in coaching. It does not explain our behaviour directly but helps us unravel how we construct our subjective world. Everyone constructs their reality from their experience, and every person’s reality is unique. Our experience is processed by our brain. Our world, so rich, colourful, musical and diverse, is created in the dark in an alien language of electrochemical signals between our brain cells. The webs of associations and meanings we make from experience are paralleled in the webs of nerve connections we make in our brain. This does not lessen the richness of our experience, but we can look ‘under the bonnet’ to see how it is created. Knowing how it is created we can create better realities.

Coaching helps people change. What does that mean in practice? Change is a movement from a present state to a desired state. In our trainings, we like to simplify coaching by exploring three questions.

First, where are we now?

To move from this, you need to understand it, especially the constraints and habits that keep you in place. You need to focus your attention. Neuroscience can tell us a great deal about attention and how to use it. Have you ever tried to keep your attention focused on one thing? A quick experiment (try it now) will show you how fickle and distractible our attention is. Sit back in your chair and take ten deep breaths, counting each one.

1. Do it anyway, you will feel better even if it does not prove a point.
2. Then repeat three times.
3. Concentrate only on your breath.
4. How far did you get without your mind wandering?
5. To get past the first set of ten is pretty good.
6. Focus and concentration are very desirable skills.
7. How can we focus our attention and avoid distractions?

Second, where do we want to be?

What do you want to create? How do you want your life to be different? Neuroscience can show us how we formulate goals, how emotion helps us decide what to do, and how working memory underpins the whole process.

Third, what is in the way?

If change were easy, no one would need a coach. There may be external obstacles, but most of the time what stops us are habits of thinking that are insufficient to solve the problem. A habit is something we do or think that was once rewarding but is no longer. It is driven by an outside stimulus, and the neural pathway runs all by itself; repeated use has made it fast and unconscious. The gossamer threads of repetition have coalesced into an iron chain. Habits are our friend when we want to stay the same, but when we want to change, habits become the enemy. The unthinking ease of the habit makes it hard to shift. Habits of thinking lead to habits of action. Habits of thinking are the automatic paths we follow without any reflection. Understanding our brain helps us in two ways. First, we will see that thinking is very easily influenced by our surroundings and other people, much more so than we think. Knowing how that happens gives us a chance to counter it. Second, understanding how the brain builds habits shows the best way to dismantle them and build new ones.

Why change now? When is the right time for a change? Sometimes, a sudden shock has brought something to the surface, or an issue has been cooking too long and now we are smelling the smoke. We change when it is important, so our values are involved. While goals and planning can be coldly cognitive, values are warmly emotional; they move us to action. Neuroscience gives us many insights into how the emotional centers in the brain (‘hot cognition’) work together with the more reasonable parts (‘cold cognition’) to plan, decide priorities and act on them.

At the heart of change is learning. How do we learn? We learn from our experiences, and we change our actions and thinking in response to our experience. We change because something new looks more valuable and rewarding. How do we attach value and reward to experiences? This is a field where neuroscience has a lot to say; the brain has a reward system fuelled by the neurotransmitter dopamine. We had better understand how this works if we want to understand value, reward and the experience of wanting. Wanting is not the same as liking. You can want something but not enjoy it, like that ...