This video explains the hand model of the brain, illustrating how understanding our brain’s emotional and evaluative parts can enhance communication and response management. It emphasises the importance of maintaining a resourceful state for better interactions, both in personal and professional settings, to foster creativity and problem-solving.
Introduction To The Brain Model
[blockquote author=”Steve Peters”]“Managing your impulsive, emotional Chimp as an adult will be one of the biggest factors determining how successful you are in life.” [/blockquote]
Timestamps
00:00 Understanding the brain
00:51 The emotional brain
02:20 Moving from triggered to resourceful
Resources
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Transcript
Our brains are complicated organs, but if we want to manage our response to other people’s communication approaches, then it’s really useful to understand how it works.
The hand model of the brain is a simple way to visualise what is happening. To create it, put your thumb in the middle of your palm and curl your fingers over the top. Your wrist and forearm are your spinal cord, as we’ve got at the back of our heads here, and all of the information goes up into our brain. Your watch represents your filter system, and this dictates how you perceive the world. Your thumb is the emotional part of your brain, and your fingers are the evaluative part of your brain or your prefrontal cortex, and this is responsible for your ability to think, reason, and create.
Now, when we feel calm, we are using both the emotional and the evaluative part of our brain, and we can bring our best selves to any situation. The emotional part of your brain has one job and one job only, and its job is to keep you safe. And what it is doing is scanning the environment for danger every four to six seconds. Now, perhaps if your boss’s number comes up on your mobile phone, you may have a reaction, and this is the emotional part of your brain being hijacked, and we fall into fight or flight. Adrenaline is now coursing through our bodies, and we’re getting ready to defend ourselves because we’ve perceived a threat. The evaluative part of our brain flips and disengages.
When the emotional part of your brain is in charge, we become hot, we become heated, we become overwhelmed, and we’re tense, and our IQ levels can drop by as much as 20 points, which means we are unable to bring our best self to any situation. Once upon a time, this was a really handy survival instinct. However, in our civilised world, it often does more harm than it does good. The quality of our thinking and our ability to interact is reduced, and we need to find a way to move from this triggered state to a more resourceful state. So the evaluative part of our brain is back in charge. This is where we perform at our best. This is where we have flexibility of thought and we are creative in our thinking.
Insights is all about helping you to understand that when you are resourceful, what is the value that you bring to the team? What is it that triggers you, and hence, what might be the poor shadow that you cast over others? Conversely, do we recognise what value our colleagues bring to the team? Do we understand how we may be inadvertently triggering them and what we can do to help them move from a triggered to a resourceful place?
Insights is all about helping us to have more conversations where there is a resourceful head to a resourceful head talking to each other, and we can collaborate beautifully with creative thinking and problem-solving rather than a triggered conversation where we fall into blame and judgment. Remember, this applies equally at work and at home. As you move through the material, think of some of the conversations that you have through the day. Are these conversations resourceful, head to resourceful head? Are they triggered head to triggered head? Have you got triggered to resourceful?
What Insights can do is to help us learn how to have more conversations on tricky topics where all parties can remain resourceful and hence influential, and discuss ideas and outcomes and make decisions that we are proud of.