Several years ago, I was leading a large team of people who had a huge portfolio of responsibilities, including managing key suppliers. During this time, we went out to tender for a supply contract which was worth about $30M and I made the decision to delegate this tender process to several members of my highly qualified team. As a result, they managed a thorough and detailed process and recommended to change to a new supplier. Although I was happy with their process, in all honesty, this supplier just didn’t feel right to me! Even when the time came to sign the contact with the new supplier, I procrastinated for days and really didn’t want to go ahead with it. However, unable to articulate a good reason why I felt this way, I chose to override my gut feeling and went ahead and signed the contact. As a result, the next two years of working with that supplier were a complete nightmare! Technically the supplier could deliver and met expectations; but in reality, the fit between the two organisations didn’t work at all. The head based decision process that was used to choose the supplier wasn’t enough to get the right outcome and, my gut reaction was actually giving me much more accurate guidance. Have you ever made a decision or taken an action that, despite following the correct process, or being logical, it just didn’t feel right? Did you go ahead and do it anyway only later on to discover that things didn’t work out or had serious consequences? There’s a growing body of research on the importance and value of intuition or “following our gut feel”. This technique is particularly useful in decision making and proves that using our intuition, combined with our knowledge of a subject results in better, more powerful decisions than using just knowledge or ‘head thinking’ alone. There are numerous theories on intuition, many supporting the concept that intuition is our unconscious mind, merely trying to pass information on to us. When doing this, it provides access to far more accurate detail, than our conscious cognitive mind could ever do. Can you imagine how powerful it is to be able to access your intuition in order to gain more information to work with when taking action and making decisions? “mBraining” is a new field of human development (Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka) which suggests that everyone, particularly leaders or those making important decisions, will have far more success if they practice accessing all the resources in their head, gut and heart. In doing this, they align their conscious and unconscious intuitive abilities, and are able to harness that priceless wisdom within them. The mBraining research and behavioural modelling has shown that each of these three brains offers a unique intelligence: HEART BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- Emoting – emotional processing (e.g. anger, grief, happiness, etc.)
- Values – processing what’s important to you / priorities (and its relationship to the emotional strength of your aspirations, dreams, desires, etc.)
- Relational affect – your felt connection with others (e.g. feelings of love/hate/indifference, uncaring, like/dislike, etc.)
GUT BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- Core identity – a deep and visceral sense of core self, and determining at the deepest levels what is “self” versus “not-self”
- Self-preservation – protection of self, safety, boundaries, etc.
- Mobilization – motility, impulse for action, gutsy courage and the will to act
HEAD BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- Cognitive perception – cognition, perception, pattern recognition, etc.
- Thinking – reasoning, abstraction, analysis, synthesis, meta-cognition, etc.
- Making meaning – semantic processing, language, narrative, metaphor, etc.
It’s easy to see, considering the prime functions of the three brains, what we might be missing out on if we don’t leverage the resources of our heart and gut brains as well as our head. How to access these three brains The first step in accessing these three brains is to bring balance to your autonomic nervous system, the system which manages your stress levels and flight/fright responses. A simple way to do this is to practice balanced breathing using a balanced inhale/exhale breathing cycle. Try ‘Balanced Breathing’ anytime using a balanced inhale/exhale breathing cycle- simply inhaling for 6 seconds and then exhaling for 6 seconds. If you do this regularly for a few minutes at a time, it will help to bring your autonomic nervous system into balance. It is good practice to use this technique before undertaking important activities like presentations, meetings and making key decisions.
