Brainstyles

Change Your Life Without Changing Who You Are

Marlane Miller

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781439141861
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

In this insightful, inspirational self-help book, readers will journey from the hard-edged realities of genetics and personal limitations to a limitless spiritual path and personal mastery of one's brainstyle.

Each of us has a natural brainstyle wired into our genes. Your brainstyle is your particular set of gifts, the essence of who you are. Neurological research has shown that the left and right sides of the brain are accessed at different speeds, and in varying sequences, in different people. This is critically important when making decisions. So important that relationships and businesses pivot around those judgments. By understanding how your brainstyle mandates your decisions, you can deliver your best in any relationship. Entertaining and easy self-tests help you to identify your brainstyle. Clarity and focus follow, along with a new foundation for self-esteem beyond personal insights to authentic ways of interacting with others that draw out the best in each of you.

CHAPTER 1

Change Your Life Without Changing Yourself

WHY IT HURTS: YOU THINK YOU NEED TO CHANGE

Nearly everything I pick up to read or watch suggests the Quick Fix to the inadequacies, victimization, or powerlessness that we assume control us. Gurus keep telling us we need their solutions to fix our suffering, our lives, our careers. Bunk.

I want to introduce you to the most important person in your life. You. By the end of this book I want you to understand that you are your own best teacher and role model.

What you will read is not a prescription for how to act or speak. The principles you will explore in this book will teach you how to uncover your strengths and non-strengths, how to ask for and get what you need from others without feeling more or less than another, and, finally, how to start working with others without asking either side to adapt or go along to get along in unnatural ways. (You’ll also find some surprising answers to the above items you may have agreed with.) When you know who you really are, then you’ll know how to go to those other books or gurus to take what you need to move down your own path.

When I talk to myself, is this what I say?

• My job is too stressful. I’m unsure what to do about it.

• There are several areas of my personality that need to improve in order to get along better with others.

• I’m a perfectionist. Nothing seems to get done right unless I do it myself.

• I need to be more assertive. People tell me I need to speak up more.

• I’m too strong. I only get along with other strong people.

• I need to change my personality to fit the situation (depending on what’s required to get what I want), but it’s stressful moving from work to home to social life.

• I’m not a team player. I don’t know how to take advantage of this fact.

• I have big dreams, yet people doubt me.

• I have always had role models who inspire me by doing things I could never do. How can I incorporate some of those things?

• I like being with people who are different. I’m bored by people like me.

• I’m afraid to have kids of my own. I don’t want to repeat my parents’ mistakes.

SOME BARRIERS

Why is it so difficult to accept ourselves as we are?

Defining your strengths may sound “old hat” at first. You may be thinking, “I already know what I’m good at. What I need to fix is all the other stuff.”

Consider this. We make two basic errors in our lives:

1. We focus on our weaknesses.

2. We do not focus on our strengths.

Why do we overlook what comes easily? For the first time, brain technology available in the 1990s gives us an answer. Reports as recent as 1992 tell of PET brain scans given by UCLA researchers to people who had previously taken an IQ test. The brain scans reveal colored pictures of the brain at work, with red indicating high activity and blue indicating low activity. The researchers predicted that the smarter the person, the harder the brain would work. Their hypothesis was a reasonable one given a commonly quoted observation that “most of us use only 10 percent of our brains.” Consequently, we believe that the more of our brain we use, the harder we work, the smarter we are.

Wrong. Just the reverse is true.

Those who performed best on the IQ test tended, on average, to produce “cooler,” more subdued PET scan patterns (blue and green colors), while their less intellectually gifted counterparts lit up like miniature Christmas trees (“hot” red and various orange hues). The brain of the less intelligent person seemed to have to work harder to achieve less.¹

It appears tbhat when we operate in our “element,” we produce results effortlessly and quickly. But when our work is effortless, it is hard to measure: it is invisible to us. We pay attention to time-consuming effort and struggle because struggle captures our awareness and holds it hostage.

We must know more about our strengths or we will overlook them. In fact it is highly probable that we base our self-images on flawed thinking and distorted perceptions right from the beginning. We value what we should be—not who we are. By definition what we are not becomes better than what we are. To make it even worse, when you revisit your past, often you only remember the embarrassments. As you think back on how you handled a situation with your parents or children or ex-girlfriend, you will look with the critical eye of what you did not do or say or accomplish. Oh, the inadequacy. The guilt. The regrets.

When we settle for the way we’ve turned out, we must then resign ourselves to mediocrity and apologize all the time. What a drag.

We want to grow. Great. But we try to grow in the wrong areas—areas that we may need to be competent in, but not areas that we necessarily need to master. Not so great.

If you think that focusing on your strengths means that life should become a perpetual party or that you can suddenly do whatever you feel like doing and to heck with everyone else, ask yourself this question: Do people, doing what they love to do, ever want to take a break from it?

For over twenty years, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied states of “optimal experience,” or peak states of enjoyment, concentration, and deep involvement that lead to growth. He calls it “flow,” or what people report when feeling strong and alert, when they experience a state of “effortless control,” where they are “unself-conscious” without a sense of time, when they forget emotional problems, where there is “exhilaration and transcendence,” going beyond the boundaries of identity. He noted that the descriptions were the same “regardless of culture, stage of modernization, social class, age, or gender.”²

The professor describes what it is like when you use your natural strengths to do something. You find things within your grasp: your concentration is keen, and your skills are stretched by the challenge. You can tell during the experience that you’re gaining on the challenge—from rock climbing to socializing to competing in a game or sport, to writing, gardening, computing, or even reading. You have a sense of control and accomplishment.

How can you create your own “flow” at what you do? Clearly, one of the first steps is to have more information about what your natural strengths really are.

FINDING “FLOW” THROUGH YOUR BRAINSTYLE

In order to achieve “flow,” you need the opportunity to apply your strengths to your activities at least 50 percent of the time according to Professor Csikszentmihalyi. When 60 to 70 percent of your daily efforts draw on your strengths, you experience a joyful life, full, rich, and satisfying. And, according to studies done in America, flow occurs most frequently for more people at work. Yet when asked, most people predicted that they would feel the best, and experience the most enjoyment, when they were at leisure.

“Oh, I can hardly wait until my vacation.” How many times have you heard that? “I might just have a great life—if only I didn’t have to have this lousy job.” Research done around the world tells us that American workers, more than those in other countries, see their work as restrictive, less pleasurable than “true” enjoyments like TV, movies, sitting around having a brewski with friends, you know, fun.

However, when asked about situations where they experienced involvement so intense that they didn’t want to think about anything else, so engaged that they forgot themselves and their emotional problems, so focused that they lost track of time and felt a real sense of accomplishment afterward, guess where they were?

Of course. More often than not, they were at work.

It appears, then, that whether at work or at play, people experience real satisfaction when they use their natural gifts to solve some problem.

Still, we manage to doubt ourselves when it comes too easily, and whatever doubt we don’t bring, others will help us manufacture.

Are you one of those people who have a quick and simple solution to things? Can you get to the bottom of things in a complex situation rather quickly even when you’re confronted with something brand-new? Do you get frustrated by people who continually get off the subject, jam up the works, and bog down the system with all their endless personal agendas and concerns? Do they then turn around and, instead of appreciating the fact that you want to get things moving, that you have a way to do what they want to do easier and faster, do they then blame you for being insensitive, pushy, arrogant, or dogmatic—bringing everything to a halt?

You may relate to Dick the consultant, trainer, and author who knows very well what to do but can’t always get people to do it for the same unfathomable reasons. Or you may be interested in meeting Peg. Finding out what’s inside the “family snob” just might be a surprise for some who find women like her a bit “aggressive” or “cold.” And you may appreciate how their “flow” occurs most clearly when they work alone, and how it ebbs as the number of people they have to work with increases.

Dick and Peg both cut to the chase, talk bottom line easily, and have no problem getting the best deal, whether in their roles as parents or professionals. You’ll meet several people in Chapter Three who think along the same lines they do. You’ll go way beyond how they appear and sound, to learn how to describe the value they (and perhaps you) add to friendships, families, or teams by the way they make decisions, set goals, plan a picnic, or lead a business. By the time you get to Chapter Eight, you’ll read about how to take advantage of what you learn with others in ways that will help you finish the job that you do so well.

Or perhaps you, like so many of us, are slogging away at shoring up your terminal weakness: taking things personally. (You may be dynamite when it comes to supporting everybody else—figuring out what others need—like Leslie. Leslie has questions about where all her dedication is leading. You may have the same type of worries.) You may say the wrong things, just blurt them out sometimes, and spend time being embarrassed and apologizing. You, like Brad, know so quickly, so surely what people are feeling—even thinking—that you react without thinking and then people react to you. You have such great ideas, so much potential; your major frustration is that you just can’t put all that magic into words or on paper so that others will support it.

So many things inspire you, and you can do so many things well, it drives you nuts when people can’t understand your type of professionalism and keep quoting the policy manual about what the rules are. People say you’re “great with people” with the kind of smirk that says “if you can’t be good at something that counts.” When you meet Brad and May in Chapter Four and find out how they have overcome their own need to be perfect in order to breeze on by the naysayers, gossips, and taskmasters to succeed, you may think again about how you look at your own strengths. Even better, by the time you get to Chapter Nine, you will have some practical strategies for getting along with the most difficult people on earth without trying to adapt or pretend to be something you’re not.

If you are still trying to change to fit in, Chapter Two will explain why you can’t change who you are, even if people think you’re the most adaptable, easygoing one in the bunch. It’s time to focus on what you do well and what to make of it.

Perhaps you have always felt different from others. You get frustrated that people can’t understand you, that they badger you with questions about how the heck you came up with that idea, that assumption. They want you to keep explaining yourself. It’s boring. They will just not trust or respect your ideas, it seems, even when you have demonstrated that you can run rings around them with new possibilities, strategies, and answers for the future. Perhaps, like Carol or David, those in your family or workplace just can’t quite seem to follow your thinking and, therefore, don’t want to hear what you have to say. You spend a lot of time in your head, inventing and visualizing answers to things others can’t even see as problems. Nothing is as much fun as whirling around those images on your mental screen and coming out with a brand-new way to swing the golf club, link up computer equipment, or design a new answer to an old problem. Your joy is in the new and untried. You, like John and Kay, whom you will also get to know in Chapter Five, enjoy, no, demand change. You are the one that pushes the edge of the envelope with analysis, reason, and wildeyed, fantastic, and random intuition. Nothing is more frustrating to you than rule-mongering policy mavens who know all the reasons why: Why something cannot be done, Why something has already been tried, Why they cannot bend the rules to help you. By the end of the chapter, you should feel the comfort of knowing you are not weird. And you’re not alone.

If you haven’t recognized your strengths so far, but have thought: I do all of those things, you may be part of the vast majority of those gifted in doing lots of things well. You see yourself succeeding in a variety of situations, and are very aware of distinctions. You may prize how well you learn and so are continually explo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Change Your Life Without Changing Yourself
• Chapter 2: Why You Don’t Have to Change
• Chapter 3: The Knower
• Chapter 4: The Conciliator
• Chapter 5: The Conceptor
• Chapter 6: The Deliberator
• Chapter 7: Test Yourself
• Chapter 8: Getting Along When Nobody Changes
• Chapter 9: The Changeless Path
• Appendix A: Brain-Based Aptitudes
• Appendix B: The BrainStyle Inventory® Scoring interpretation and Discussion
• Appendix C: Technical Report: Construct Validation of a New Measure of BrainStyles
• Appendix D: BrainStyles—Myers-Briggs Relationships Research Report January 1995
• Appendix E: Additional Worksheets
• About Marlane Miller
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright