- Category: Individuals
I’d like to offer an alternative premise to this glut of the newest new things in manipulating human behavior: Your “self” needs no help. To improve yourself, be more yourself. BrainStyles offers a breakthrough for interactions based on the speed of access to areas of the brain that determine what you’re best at and offers a simple, practical solution: Timing.
Teaching BrainStyles around the world (in 8 languages) has proven that culture, race, gender, age and education matter not when it comes to brainstyle.
- Category: Individuals
Am I Losing My Mind?
No matter what your age, consider your brain health. People with healthy brains are able to make decisions more easily, live more fulfilled lives, and may, in some cases, delay the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. So how do you keep your brain healthy?
The same way you keep the rest of your body healthy.
- Category: Individuals
How to delay the effects of aging on your brain
Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York Times, October 25, 2015
According to professor Friedman, “The very notion of cognitive enhancement is seductive and plausible. After all, the brain is capable of change and learning at all ages. Our brain has remarkable neuroplasticity; that is, it can remodel and change itself in response to various experiences and injuries. So can it be trained to enhance its own cognitive prowess?
- Category: Coaches & Trainers
By Constance Clancy, ED.D, Licensed Mental Health Therapist
Julie and Matt are a married couple who have entered counseling for the first time to receive guidance for multiple marital issues. They have been married for eight years and have three children, ages 10, (from Julie’s first marriage) 5 and 3.
- Category: Individuals
Are you going through a difficult medical situation? I was diagnosed and treated twice for breast cancer. BrainStyles helped me through the entire process. Learn how BrainStyles may also help you through a difficult medical situation like cancer.
- Category: Coaches & Trainers
The Original Game-Changing Research
BrainStyles began in 1982 with David Cherry, the CEO of a startup high-tech plastics company. With a mere $5 million in sales, ongoing losses, failing equipment, and 24% interest rates, the business was up against enormous odds. Worse, the stressed management team was struggling and conflicted.
In this environment, the CEO began observing his executives in high-pressure meetings, he asked why the “smartest” guy on the team was slowest with his expertise. Why did the “tough guy” on the team shed tears two days after firing someone?
- Category: Individuals
Sometimes talking to a family member or loved one may be challenging. Different communication styles, different ways of solving problems, and different ways of processing information may make it difficult to build a relationship. However, by understanding different brainstyles, we may better understand our loved ones. Our relationships with them will grow closer.
- Category: Individuals
Michael Jordan once said, “There is no I in team, but there is an I in WIN.” While many assumed this to be a selfish quote, there is another way of looking at it. It brings up the question: if everyone played to his or her strengths, would the team benefit? Jordan’s 6 national championships with the Chicago Bulls say Yes.
- Category: Couples
Do you find that you see situations differently from your partner?
Here is a situation where two people see the same situation very differently. The left-brained husband is more factual, quick to answer and objective; the right brained wife reacts without words until the feelings reach the left brain to speak them.
- Category: Couples
BrainStyles Wisdom
The sun came through the clouds, and the family all agreed: time for a boat ride! While the men prepared the boat and water skis, Mom gathered up towels, snacks, sunscreen, and hats and tiptoed through the wet grass to the dock. Stepping around a mound of mud where the shore meets the dock, her first step slipped out from under her and she went down, slamming the other leg into the edge of a dock plank. Now in painful splits, she crept back up on the dock and tried to lift the bruised and bloody shin to lessen the pain and swelling. Her husband called out, “What happened?” while her son and nephew stood with open mouths, motionless.
- Category: Couples
I’m accustomed to high-stakes negotiating including several house purchases, as well as corporate contracts while at IBM, and ongoing vendor/supplier deals in my consulting business. Thus, I’ve acquired the role for our family as the leader in major acquisitions. To be honest, I was self-appointed in spite of my distaste for such tasks as the negotiation of price or the comparison of details and facts. And I received praise from friends and family members for “handling it all”. So I kept on.
- Category: Managers & Teams
In working with a well-known company who had conducted system-wide diversity training, I learned from the attendees that the gist of the message was to make them wrong for their hiring policies of the past. The managers were made to feel guilty for hiring the best and the brightest college grads, and, along with other guilt-laden discussions, were provided a simple answer: just hire more women and minorities. The purpose of doing so was not clear to them, other than that this was the law. The women and minorities in the room said they felt undermined, embarrassed. I am sure there was more taught than this, but that is the message they heard.
- Category: Managers & Teams
Lou was standing when Gary came into his office. He opened impatiently, “It’s been a bad morning, Gary. I hope this won’t take long. I’ve got to catch a plane this afternoon. I just found out an hour ago.” Uh Oh, thought Gary, but, typical for his brainstyle, he showed no visible reaction when under pressure.
- Category: Coaches & Trainers
Working with a Left-Brained Coach
Vince Lombardi was, for the uninitiated, one of the “winningest” coaches of modern American football and took the Green Bay Packers to legendary status with his left-brained, tough, relentless focus on winning. He famously said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” For those with his gifts, tough perseverance come naturally.
- Category: Individuals
In BrainStyles, there is a unique concept called Time Zero. Simply put, Time Zero is when you confront a new or unfamiliar situation and must use your natural brain hardware to think through an answer and take action, rather than remember what to do. This requires our natural brain processing, or brainstyle. Often this is disconcerting when we expect ourselves to be smart, quick, and know what we’re doing. We give up authenticity in favor of looking good.
- Category: Individuals
Personal Mastery with BrainStyles
Marlee Alex, an Oregon writer, begins an article entitled “Listening,” by describing how her self-inflicted criticism turned her natural gift into an adolescent curse.
- Category: Individuals
Use your experiences for the future.
One of the earliest principles to emerge when teaching what was to become The BrainStyles System® was how to “reframe” criticisms by focusing on natural brain-based strengths. This came to mean re-looking at the labels you use to name what you do and who you are with the brainstyles definitions of strengths. Further work led to observations about the source of criticisms, along with the distinction between a brainstyle strength from a non-strength.
- Category: Individuals
The sport I have attempted to learn over the last decade is golf. I find the sport a very apt metaphor for most of living. In a recent clinic to improve my game, I learned the following things which I believe translate to living and performing in daily life.
- Category: Coaches & Trainers
Why Telephone Coaching Is So Effective.
A BrainStyle defines the way our brain processes unfamiliar, incoming information most efficiently. When we access our “left brain” and “right brain,” obviously there is much more going on than merely thinking, or cognitive processing, of facts and feelings. Sensory input arrives in the billions of bits. We recognize, sort, distill, associate, give words and thoughts to an event as we interpret the meaning, emote, label, and then, whew, decide what to say or do about it.
- Category: Couples
What parents and grandparents are observing is true, and now brain research tells why. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News (2/29/16, D. Howland) "the outbursts, the emotional 'allergy' to parents, and even the risk-taking behaviors is actually valuable to their growing up."
- Category: Individuals
Smiling Does, too :)
According to Professor Amy Cuddy of Harvard, “bodies can change our mind.” In her studies over years, she concluded that “positive body language can significantly improve your thoughts, feelings, attitude, and actions through a number of mechanisms, all of which contribute to a more resilient you.” But wait, there’s more: “positive body language can help you become more optimistic, perseverant, and resilient.”
- Category: Individuals
“Older people—say in their seventies—walking at a brisk pace …will tend to look younger, healthier and more vigorous than those who are ambling. This impression is borne out by the science. The slowest walkers – particularly men – are almost twice as likely to die in the next few years compared to the fastest.
What’s more, when people slow down their walking pace significantly over a two-year period, their chances of dying in the next few years almost double”.
- Category: Individuals
What is happiness to you? A hug? A compliment that makes you feel proud? A successful diet? A new outfit? An accomplishment of an item on your To-do list?
In a survey of a group of 18 leading psychological experts who focus on positive emotions and ultimately, happiness, their consensus of definitions might help you focus on how to start leaning into something that is longer lasting, independent of external, temporary events, and comes from within:
- Category: Individuals
If it seems like friendships formed in adolescence are particularly special, that's because they are.
Childhood, adolescent, and adult friendships all manifest differently in part because the brain works in different ways at those stages of life. During adolescence, there are changes in the way you value, understand, and connect to friends.
As brain imaging shows, when we’re below the age of 9 or 10, the friendships we make are somewhat superficial and don’t involve much of the brain.