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LEADERSHIP IS A PROCESS OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE, WHICH MAXIMISES THE EFFORTS OF OTHERS TOWARDS THE ACHIEVEMENT OF A SHARED GOAL.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Positive Leadership: Wired for Winning

Imagine where today could take you if you changed one routine – and hitched your wagon to a new star.

Your new approach to win, after some repetition, will replace stress and eliminate dangerous cortisol that keeps you back.   Each act toward attaining the win you desire literally alters your brain cell connections.  Every act in the opposite direction of worry, adds chemicals and electricity for a bold approach to work and life.

New goals for winning directions take root in the brain’s basal ganglia, that storehouse of your actions and responses, which lies beneath the prefrontal cortex. Focused on a novel goal, the basal ganglia shoots an enormous number of neural signals to guide the brain toward your winner focus. See why your new directions – against worry – come more easily and rapidly as they are lived?

Rather than look to past issues that worried you, or to events that worry others, the brain performs better when you concentrate on strengthening neural patterns for relaxing and for trusting your bold new steps toward what you want to attain. The brain tends to get you what you focus on and do, but does not distinguish well between should or should not. For instance, if you emphasise “not worrying,” it builds neuron pathways more to worrying, than to relaxing. Would you agree that is also a terrific reason for telling people more of what they do well, and emphasise less of what they do poorly?

Are you aware of how organisations and nations wire your brain for fear, bad choices and anxiety? The opposite of rewiring for calm – is to focus on bad news, get caught in negative workplace politics, or act in negative ways that start with groves in your brain and soon become the ruts that run your basal ganglia for worry and negativity. Your solution? Recognise the need for change, and then select one activity to do – in the opposite direction. While this first step is critical for leaders who desire change, it also starts with you and rewires your brain for setting a new pace. As you refocus your behaviour, others may not choose to emulate you at first. Over time, however, because of the brain’s built-in equipment to mimic others around you, some will refocus away from negativity, worry and naysaying, toward healthier habits for profitable growth.

Likely you are asking, but what about organisational change? The potential within tools from neuroplasticity – to rewire entire organisations for emphasising and attaining more positive targets, is huge, yet mostly unrealised.

Knowing that it starts within you rather than in others, look first look in opposite directions of anxiety that wires entire organisations for pessimism and loss. Then, focus today on one novel way of thinking, however unnatural at first, in order to rewire from anxious to calm.  

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