How Positive Neuroplasticity Can Help You As a Leader

With the current leadership challenges you are facing these days, it can feel like so much is out of your control - the economic landscape, the changing world of work, unprecedented levels of ambiguity and climate change.

Yet, there are many things that are within your control, more than you imagine.

Epictetus, the philosopher, once wrote, “learn to distinguish what you can and can’t control. Within our control are our opinions, aspirations, desires, and the things that repel us. They are directly subject to our influence.”

Over the past 20 years, I have worked with leaders and organizations to weather so many storms successfully. One of the practices that we share with many of our clients is called “positive neuroplasticity,” a body of work developed by one of my mentors Dr. Rick Hanson.

In our work at TLI, we define positive neuroplasticity as “the ability to actively recondition how your brain and body are working to improve your leadership effectiveness, it is your capacity to grow new brain cells and create new neural connections in response to specific practices you engage in.”

Many people believe positive neuroplasticity is just “positive thinking,” but it is actually a set of tools and practices that work directly with your neural pathways in your brain to recondition experiences, memories, habits, patterns and even fears.

It’s helpful to think about positive neuroplasticity as an ongoing practice to help you recondition your thoughts, habits and patterns to create new neural pathways which then result in new thinking, behaviors and actions.

Here are a couple of ways positive neuroplasticity could help you as a leader based on the ways we’ve integrated it into our executive coaching work with clients:

Client #1

“I got 360 feedback that I seem rushed and distracted and that I didn’t care about people.”

With this client, I began by exploring the feedback and when it was true and also not true. We looked at a primary belief they had around rushing and if you don’t rush, you don’t get things done. The challenge with this way of operating is it was perceived as not caring by his team.

So, we used positive neuroplasticity to begin to work on how to approach his team in a non-rushed way which meant reconditioning those neural pathways that are all about rushing into a more productive way of leading that helped him connect more with his team and get the feedback a couple of months later from a team member, “I feel like you are more available to us and not always pushing through when we talk, thank you for respecting me and how I work.”

Client #2

“My executive team said they are unsure I have the confidence and gravitas needed to advance in my career.”

When you think about confidence and gravitas, it can be difficult to pinpoint the actual behaviors that signal you have both and are ready for an executive role. With this client, we worked on how they currently perceived themselves as a leader and my client said, “I have always seen myself looking up to executives but not actually becoming one…I do want to progress in my career but it seems like an insurmountable challenge to get to that level.”

So, we worked together to identify the beliefs that were keeping this leader at a middle management level to start then we mapped out when/how that was showing up when they interacted with senior leadership. There were many deeply rooted beliefs based on this leaders upbringing but, as we worked through the positive neuroplasticity practices, she was able to begin to generate new ideas to build her confidence and gravitas.

Beyond the new thinking, by working at a neural level in the brain, she actually experiences changes in how she carried herself, presented and influenced others. She said, “this seemed subtle at first but now I see the power of working to change my brain in this way.”

I hope these two examples gave you a sense of how positive neuroplasticity can help you in your leadership. When used in a deliberate and focused manner, positive neuroplasticity practices can help you target and recondition leadership behaviors that are no longer serving you.

When you work at this core level (working directly with the brain, neural pathways and your nervous system), you can create new ways of operating that are sustainable very quickly. Changing your mindset can start you on the journey but does not actually change the workings and structure of your brain to support the new thinking and actions.

Leadership Practice

Begin to chart out a specific situation you would like to show up differently in as a leader. What new result do you want to create? What corresponding thought matches that result? And, how could you begin to shift your current thinking to generate that result?

About Athena

Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations. Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.