Posts in Brain and Mind
Courage is the new resilience

Recently, we gave some workshops on resilience and courage. I’m here to tell you that courage is where it’s at. Stuff resilience! Go for courage! Courage is the new resilience. The way science talks about resilience it makes you think that you either have it or you don’t (not true) and that we understand resilience (we don’t). You can’t be taught resilience but you can be taught how to be courageous.

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How does courage work in your brain?

Imagine you’re part of a study: you lie down in a functional MRI machine which looks at blood flow inside your brain. You’re staring at a live snake on a movable trolley not too far away. The snake moves; it eyes you off; you eye the snake off. Your task is to force yourself to do what you fear: move it closer and closer to your head. You can push the snake away anytime you want, no hard feelings, experiment over, but you’re asked to be determined.

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The Psychology of Intent, Impact and Trust

Whenever we speak, we share our thoughts and feelings as well as raw information. Through feelings underneath the words, we literally give others a piece of our mind. Written words are very different to spoken words. Written words are next to lifeless on a page, but when someone speaks to us, there’s always emotion and intent; we feel their ‘feelings underneath,’ we feel their presence. There’s always a small possibility of aggression when two humans meet, so the impact of spoken words can immediately be comforting or confronting. Spoken words are loaded not only with information as in a text-book, but also with the intentions, desires and emotions of a living mind. These convey acceptance and goodwill, or rejection and ill-will. (And you thought “hello” just meant “hello”.)

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Intent and impact in the brain

We humans are sly, and can use this to our advantage. Through the social brain, we transmit ‘feelings underneath’ which can be loaded with subliminal messages: I like you, you disgust me, I want to have sex with you, you’re being unfair, that hurt, I’m bored with you, and more. These messages can be felt by others but can be denied by us because we didn’t use words. This saves our reputation but hides our real intentions.

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Intent vs Impact

Do the culture wars have you walking on egg-shells? Does political correctness leave you too anxious to talk to anyone? Have you ever had a situation where you thought you were being helpful but ended up offending someone? Has anyone ever taken offence at your jokes? But I didn’t intend to insult you! You took it the wrong way! I didn’t mean it!

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Men, break the chain of strong negative emotions (2)

In this last post, we look at handling triggers, reactions and letting go of emotions. A trigger is something that sets you off: a car back-firing is a trigger to those who have been in combat, words can be triggers if a parent belittled you constantly, someone raising their voice is a trigger if past arguments lead to violence. Anything can be a trigger. The way to break this link, is to know your triggers, be aware of them and be ready for them.

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Men, Break the chain of strong negative emotions (1)

In this post, we look at stopping hurt and clearing the pool of unresolved strong negative emotions before a build up of sludge. The first link to break is the hurt.

First link: Hurt

Hurt leads to our sludge-pool of unresolved emotions deep inside. If there were less hurt in the world, there would be less unresolved emotions lurking inside. Much of life is competition: someone wins or loses, that’s why we love our sport. Winning feels good and losing hurts, but it’s an OK lesson. Here we’re talking about deeper hurts: harsh dads, abuse, broken relationships, failures.

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Overcome negative emotions (men)

Men, do you want to overcome negative emotions? We’re going to learn how to break the chain of strong negative emotions. It all begins with hurt. Hurt can lead to a volcano of emotions. Men become destructive when the accumulated volcano of emotions becomes too much to handle. But each link in the chain can be broken, a solution can be found. There’s a way out, something you can do, a better turn to take.

Here’s the chain of strong negative emotions:

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