Train Your CEO Brain

and Become Your Best Self

Margriet Sitskoorn

• Publisher: Management Impact Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789462762183
• eBook ISBN: 9789462762299
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Train Your CEO Brain and Become Your Best Self explains how you can use the plasticity of your brain to develop yourself. This book links theory to practice, and includes targeted exercises to train your executive brain.

Train Your CEO Brain is intended to help you achieve your goals for personal growth, your job or business, your family, or the world around you.

Train Your CEO Brain is useful for whatever specific goal you have in mind: starting a new business, earning a degree, improving your parenting skills, quitting smoking, you name it. The point is, you can make a difference through your own efforts, by changing your brain and improving your skills. Reading this book will be a game-changer. You can learn to captain your own ship and even guide others you're responsible for. In that sense, this book is also about leadership.

Margriet Sitskoorn is a Full Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on how behavior and environment affect the brain, and how people can use this knowledge to develop themselves. Sitskoorn is an acclaimed public speaker and consultant. She is the author of several bestsellers and her work has been translated into various languages.

PART II
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR CEO BRAIN: THE EFFECT PROGRAM

How to develop your prefrontal cortex and the executive skills that will help you achieve your goals and be successful.

Chapter 6 Environmental Enrichment – Challenging Your Brain

In this chapter you’ll learn why stimulating your brain is key, and how training your prefrontal cortex will encourage you to do what you’ve always wanted to do.

Ping-pong balls

This experiment requires a bit of preparation and a conscious decision. You will need:

–A ping-pong ball,

–Masking tape or Scotch tape,

–A sharp knife,

–A radio or a smartphone.

Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tune the radio to white noise (or use your smartphone for this purpose).1 Find a quiet place, tape the halves of the ping-pong balls over both your eyes, so that you’re looking at the inside of the halves, and then lie down and listen to the white noise. Now wait patiently. It is definitely worth waiting, because after a minute or two you’ll start experiencing something bizarre. Pink elephants, chocolate fountains and dancing criminals are just a few of the things people have reported seeing when doing this experiment. So, before you begin, think about whether you are sure you want to try this. You never know what you might see. I will explain why this happens after you’ve tried it.

This experiment makes use of what is known as the Ganzfeld effect (German for complete field). Putting the ping-pong ball halves over your eyes creates a homogenous field of vision, a blankness. This, combined with the white noise, deprives your brain of all meaningful sensory stimulation. And that is something your brain can’t stand. So, it starts generating information on its own. And as you just found out, it can induce visions of practically anything.

I came across the ping-pong ball experiment in The Boston Globe and it really made me think. The point is to show you that your brain craves new experiences and information. The experiment is geared to that. Deprive your brain of new input and you’ll lose touch with reality and start to hallucinate. Now that you understand how this works, you’ll begin to see why people who never do anything new or only take in one-sided information sometimes have such strange ideas, but also why solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are so terrible and are used as a torture method.

Experience-dependent plasticity

At the end of Chapter 4, ‘A Recipe for Success’, you read about n...

Table of contents

• Preface
• PART IGAINING SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• PART II HOW TO TRAIN YOUR CEO BRAIN: THE EFFECT PROGRAM
• PART IIIHARVESTING THE FRUIT OF YOUR LABORD