You likely know that links between what people crave and what you can offer, requires you to connect the dots between your current position and creative prosperity. But have you ever considered how vital connections also boost innovative brainpower?
5 Vital Connections to Innovative Brainpower
The opposite is also true. Cut out your connections and by default you diminish brainpower to invent.
Rather than pack your brain with links that go nowhere, why not jettison your life and leadership forward with 5 essential connections.
Jumpstart brainpower found in highly innovative minds only, when you:
- Join what you already know to what you wish to know in order to invent something new. Human brains come equipped to latch onto new facts faster if they hook to what you already know and do. How could that open new opportunities for you to start with your current talents and learn what it takes to fill an innovative niche you see – yes, even in an economic downturn.
- Connect skills you are learning to insights others offer, by linking your facts to their interests. While delivering information works against the human brain, teaching others as we learn ourselves pays back 90% more in retention. Intelligent people also build prosperous alliances in this way.
- Link solution possibilities to every problem encountered. Einstein constantly cultivated curiosity, for example, by linking suggested solutions to problems. While others passed over, complained about, and whined about what could be – he connected himself to the problem of relativity by imagining he rode the curve of the arc. When you look at problems with solutions in mind, the human brain builds neuron pathways to create answers you seek.
- Draw together diverse people and welcome opposing views. I’ve learned during a lifetime in renewal work that to connect opposing views is to spot nuances that others miss on both sides of issues. It requires being less opinionated about most everything, and pays wonderful dividends to those who stay open-minded. For instance tradition insists on the separation of hard and soft skills, and then places these in silly hierarchies. Here at MITA we combine the best of both into what we term smart skills with the brain in mind for 21st Century leadership strategies that work for a new era.
- Join science to art and use imagination as innovative glue to intergrate. You have two well equipped sides to the human brain, and both play a keen role in highly sustainable innovation. To kindle and design ideas such as these top creative moments that hit new heights in the last decade, takes connecting the art and science from your left and right brain.
Pair these essentials together and you’ll increase neuron connections come with brainpower for new innovative heights. Make fewer connections, on the other hand, and you’ll limit your mental ability to create. Simply put, your daily connections determine your IQ growth, since increased neural connections equal higher intelligence.
Did you know that babies are born with 20 times more neural connections than adults? Why so? Experiences you have in a day - either create or diminish neural connections for creativity. Schools tend to teach by delivery and that kills connections that come from doing as people learn. Luckily it’s not all bad news.
Thanks to plasticity however, the human brain rewires new neural connections daily – based on what you do. Or you can lose connections by ruts, routines, and passivity. Does that challenge you to step outside of comfort zones, connect what has yet to fit together in your world, and spark the innovation ability in your brain and organization?
]]>Find yourself working against growth in your career? Standing still while others ride new waves of innovation?
Rewire your Brain for Growth
If you face financial problems, relationship struggles, or workplace inertia – you can blame it on your brain. The brain’s proclivity to default to harmful ruts can cause you to work against triumph.
Luckily, that same brain offers you tools to win mind-bending breaks, even in the toughest times. How so?
Here are 25 ways to reboot brainpower and zap innovative growth plans with a few jolts from brain sciences:
1. Invent and share a refreshing solution to a stubborn work problem – solve a difficulty that leaves you bored or in a rut at work. Brain fact: Boredom is more a habit formed in brains, and shaped by daily choices, then stored in brain as a reality.
2. Uplift your work area with natural lighting. Brain fact: Environments influence brainpower, and a healthy workplace inspires people to transform problems into solutions.
3. Thank a fellow worker for a personal accomplishment. Brain fact: Well being comes partially from and is fueled by serotonin chemical hormones that accompany acts of kindness.
4. Give somebody the gift of forgiveness, and let go of a grudge. Brain fact: Anger, fear, and frustration are fueled by harmful cortisol chemical hormones that come with rancor.
5. Propose alternatives to an annoying habit or flawed practice. Brain fact: Venting is bad for the brain and creates new neuron pathways to many more complaints.
6. Act like the person you want others to see in you, and that person you’ll become. Brain fact: Dendrite brain cells use the outside world to take their shapes, and grow new connections based on what you do each day.
7. Vary your background sounds so that you add music for more motivation. Brain fact: Music changes brain wave speeds in ways that impact moods and alter your productivity.
8. Stir curiosity and engage others around you. Brain fact: Lectures and talks work against listener brains, and benefit speaker intelligence only, while failing to benefit from listener insights.
9. Shift routines up daily with lived diversity. Brain fact: Hebbian workers rewire daily for ruts and routines that kill incentives, limit focus or even shrink their brains from stress.
10. Include differences as assets. Brain fact: Common diversity training tends to fail participants mentally, by painting inclusion as a deficit model – rather than as assets added through differences.
11. Sleep well in order to perform well. Brain fact: Brain waves can bring either sleep or peak performance, based on how you activate and manage them.
12. Research and open mentally to new and different ideas daily. Brain fact: Hook even difficult facts onto one thing you know and learning increases in less time.
13. Change on regular basis. Brain fact: Your brain’s basal ganglia stores old facts and creates ruts, while working memory holds few new facts and leads change.
14. Survey and engage more strengths. Brain fact: Multiple intelligences are common to all, used by few, and can be cultivated daily with regular use as mental tools.
15. Create rather than criticize. Brain fact: Cynical or critical mindsets literally block creativity, limit talent in you or others, and stomp out innovation.
16. List key facts as guides and reminders. Brain fact: Memory can be outsourced to help you remember more, and to free your mind to focus fully on tasks in the moment.
17. Inspire novel young ideas. Brain fact: Plasticity enables people of all ages and backgrounds to rewire their brains in ways that prosper from young and agile acumen.
19. Encourage yourself and others often. Brain fact: Encouragement changes the chemistry of a brain through raised serotonin, and ratchets up tone for profitability.
19. Communicate with care, openness and honesty. Brain fact: Meta messages destroy relationships through implications that differ from actual messages spoken.
20. Integrate projects from ideas and people across many fields. Brain fact: It often takes an integration of hard and soft skills to solve problems with the brain in mind.
21. Relax and practice letting worries go. Brain fact: Stress literally shrinks the brain, and anxious tones in communication act as silent brainpower killers.
22. Seek genuine and lasting relationships at work. Brain fact: Greet colleagues through speaking people’s names, to offer spike in well being or awareness in person’s brain.
23. Risk innovative progress, one step at a time. Brain fact: Inspire creativity and invention through teaching others cutting edge approaches, at the same time you develop them.
24. Collaborate for stellar solutions. Brain fact: Create new neuron pathways through collective brainpower, to facilitate democratic solutions to workplace problems.
25. Celebrate gender proclivities. Brain fact: Women’s and men’s brain differ biologically and intellectually, for instance, in ways that few optimize.
How could these few applications from facts about your brain increase workplace brainpower and toss more innovation into your 2010?
This post appeared in SmartBrief on your Career on June 3, 2010. Thanks for your kind mention SmartBrief Editors!
]]>Gridlock feeds ego and shuts out brainpower
while transparency
fosters innovation and increases trust.
The more gridlock we see, the more open exchanges get lost. Have you seen bullies and cynics keep ego alive by banishing transparency through backdoor deals?
Flawed leadership, whether called democracy or dictatorship generates gridlocks that block creative brainpower.
Never before in history have we needed more successful innovators who rev up mental equipment for innovation.
It’s true that Barak Obama, Bill Gates, Ursula Burns, and Hillary Clinton communicate see-through stories to leave no brain is left behind. Still, leadership openness is rare. Why so?
One friend and fellow leader Dave Caiazza, put it this way:
Work against the dangerous twins of jealousy and hypocrisy. They come disguised as concern, shrouded in statistics, and hidden behind a smile. When you’re good at something, there will always be someone who wants to undo you. Don’t let them.
Transparency takes brainpower to tackle toxins from cynics who broker backdoor deals. How so?
1. Awaken more intrapersonal intelligence so that others will be led to respond openly to ethics that tend to follow.
2. Respond to confrontations by snipping your amygdala and peers often repeal demands spoken.
3. Spot opportunities within broken systems – and others tend to join with like minded willingness to risk riding transparency’s surf.
4. Relate neuro discoveries that resolve conflicts and reasonable parts of your brain win supremacy.
5. Offer mental olive branches to people who disagree and they tend to collaborate without forcing their views on one side.
6. Hone brainpower tools for peace rather than promote war where gridlock battles begin.
7. Suggest simplicity that adds intelligence to replace mental clutter with clear ethical practices that hold dividends for all.
8. Avoid hidden traps of cynicism by building transparent tone to open segues for all to speak and feel heard.
9. Brainstorm solutions with innovative peers rather than join in with naysayers who toss toxins into the mental mix.
10. Activate, encourage and open communication that sparks innovation, rarely found in tragic traits of a cynic.
Step into any gridlock situation and you’ll spot far more routines, ruts and rituals, than innovative designs can survive. Have you seen it?
Luckily, newly discovered mental equipment offers tools such as new neuron pathways to dynamic innovation. See why transparency’s not possible when ego generates gridlock?
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Hello friends and colleagues!
Please join me over at wonderfully motivating community led by Huffington Post writer, Gail Goodwin, 
on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at InspireMeToday.com!
On Monday, the 18th I’ll share invited insights from my experiences in an exclusive 500-word article – Act Like a Genius – on the best things learned in life full of beneficial nuggets for you! Gail hosted an audio interview on brain insights at the same site which shows how to get more brainpower up and running strong. Would love to hear your nuggets too!
While visiting InspireMeToday.com, Gail Goodwin invites you to sign up free daily inspiration email and free 44 page eBook Secrets to Soaring. These motivational gifts are there to inspire and encourage you on your 2010 journey.
On behalf of the InspireMeToday.com family, thanks for joining me on Monday, Jan. 18th. Greatly appreciate you!
Stay blessed in the New Year,
Ellen
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Canadian Alanna Mitchell, this year’s winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in public policy named brains as the secret to better schools. Not all agree. 
Mitchell recalled a Minister of Education who asked a neuroscientist: “The brain? What does the brain have to do with education?” In my renewal work across many countries I heard similar surprising statements. Have you heard it?
Mitchell argues for centuries of scientific discoveries about human brains to be applied to teaching. From her award winning series on applying brain discoveries at school, here are ten key points to ponder with teens brains in mind:
1. The reason schools aren’t quickly shifting to a brain based teaching approach is because it’s still a secret, unknown to most educators and policy makers, and perhaps more importantly, to parents. Do you agree?
2. Some academics and bureaucrats are dead set against changing current practices, according to Mitchell. Neuroeducator, Zachary Stein of Harvard University calls it, simply a failure of imagination.
3. Teachers patrolled like prison guards in one middle school where Mitchell spoke, looming over teens whenever they showed the least bit of enthusiasm. One teacher shuffled to the front and suggested the questions be dropped in favor of telling teens what they were to know.
4. Teens and teachers’ brains still continue to grow new synaptic connections and replace lost neurons. A key part of learning is the process of pruning those synapses to make them work faster.
5. Neuroscience tells us that the brain is a platform upon which intelligence can be built, rather than the determinant of a fixed intelligence. As organs, brains expand, and should be treated as something to improve, than than prove. Psychologist Guy Claxton, at the University of Winchester sees schools’ role to help that expansion happen.
6. Warring fields of neuroscience and education are merging into an international movement, that is gathering strength in US, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Here at the MITA International Brain Center, we agree with the Mitchell’s quote from Howard Jones: Neuroscience on its own is completely without meaning. It has to be integrated with psychology and what we know about education.
7. When Harvard launched their Mind, Brain, and Education Program at their graduate school of education, faculty couldn’t agree for a long time, that the term, brain, should even be in their title.
8. Teens or adult brains hold somewhere between 100 trillion and 500 trillion synapses, and can prune as well as build new ones throughout life. In effect, the more synapses, and the more efficiently they connect, the smarter you are. The key to learning is to find different ways into brains that value multiple approaches, and avoid cookie-cutter methods.
9. There are no textbooks at an Australian science and mathematics school. The entire school is founded on the adolescent brain and how it learns. Mitchell found that it’s what teens could look like if their biology were taken seriously.
10. Teens and young adults undergo vast brain changes in their frontal cortex, that are rarely considered as factors that impact their learning. This part of the brain – where the highest level thinking and analysis take place, is laying down white matter, or myelin. This fatty sheath insulates nerve fibers so they can communicate more quickly. Teens need relevance because their brains are geared to understanding systems. Ask them, for instance, how to build a well for clear water in Africa.
Jim Davis, principal at Australian Science & Mathematics School demonstrates what teaching teens could look like if their brains were taken seriously. Davis recommends a brain shift among grown ups: showing faith in the teen’s powerful, growing neural networks and in their biological imperative to move their world forward.
Do you agree with Alanna Mitchell’s award winning insights from experts? Or with Davies’ conclusion: If we do that, then all sorts of magic can happen?
If so, what’s holding your school back from bringing the secrets of brain into teen’s learning through rejuvenated secondary schools?
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