“Based on decades of brain and behavioral science research, our goal is to develop your understanding of human behavior in business and help you and your clients to experience more overall success.”

Coaching with your Brain in Mind is designed to unlock new perspectives on business success. By combining your current knowledge of business, coaching and consulting with the results of brain and behavioral science research, we give you tested brain science insights that will allow you to expand, improve, and deepen your impact as a coach, consultant, and leader.

Thursday, June 28, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., at Rancho Santa Fe, CA (just north of San Diego). Come join us and learn how to take your own development to its next logical step!

Develop as a Professional
Further understand yourself using brain science and psychology. This is the foundation of behavior analysis. The best coaches and consultants are able to shape their interactions with clients based on an understanding of human behavior. After this session, you will begin to use knowledge of social behavior supported by brain science to become most effective for your clients.

The Scientific Approach to Executive Coaching
Separate yourself easily from the crowd of ho-hum coaches. Identifying and diagnosing your clients’ workplace behavioral dynamics and issues from the perspective of brain science will open the door for faster, more sustainable change. Your clients will immediately find your coaching and counseling more helpful, effective and thought provoking.

Their Success Means Your Success
Surround yourself with experts whose goal is growing your effectiveness and ultimately your career. You will leave the New Brain for Business Institute’s session on Coaching With Your Brain in Mind with a new perspective and clear ideas for expanding your impact as an executive coach and consultant.

To claim one of the limited seats of Coaching With Your Brain in Mind follow the button below.

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Nothing in business – no single action or result – happens without human intervention. And yet, many coaches and consultants use tools and methods that are outdated and ineffective. Here is an example:

Many business people, perhaps including you, continue to use brainstorming as a method for generating new, compelling ideas. They use this approach with the firm belief that it makes sense and works, and yet there is now overwhelming evidence that brainstorming results in limited creativity and innovation.

Understanding brain and behavioral science allows us to better understand how our clients behave.

Why do they resist change?

Why do they insist on making unreasonable demands on their employees?

Why do they create working environments that result in under-performance?

The answers to these questions along with many others reside in our learning from brain science. It explains how we, ourselves, continue to under-perform, and it provides ways to be more effective in dealing with the people around us.

The better our ability to invite the best of human behavior around us, the better our business results will be. Coaching With Your Brain in Mind is the first step towards applying brain science to your business for better results.

Adding a deeper understanding of human behavior to your mix can do that. Many coaches and consultants use models, concepts and tools that have been intuitively or anecdotally created, yet still manage to lead to behavioral change. If these tools are not empirically sound, as is common, they may not be influencing change at the rate you and your clients’ desire. The change you do create may lack the initially expected effect and there are often long-term, unintended consequences.

Here are a few questions to consider:

• Have you ever paid a return visit to a client, only to find that the impact of your work has diminished or strayed into an inefficient new direction?

• Do you have clients who continue using the tools you provided, but have become inconsistent, predictable and irrelevant?

• Do your current tools provide more comfort than progress, because they confirm what you or others already think?

Using brain science as a foundation, this program helps to develop coaches into empirically based thinkers. Coaching With Your Brain in Mind explores the ‘why’ behind effective business strategies. It illuminates how you may be derailing your own success and how you can create new solutions to your problems. With this understanding, two opportunities surface:

• You can use this added knowledge to increase your own skills at influencing meaningful and sustainable change.

• You can begin to build an expanded range of successful approaches for your clients.

By understanding what strategies work for you, you can move into broader and deeper issues with your current clients and attract new clients who want to have a more sophisticated and contemporary understanding of the science behind human behavior.

See early-bird pricing for Coaching With Your Brain in Mind.

After reviewing business results over the past 100 years, two facts are striking.

• Profits have fallen and leveled out with no indication of increasing. Regardless of the various tools, methods or ideas that have flourished regarding business success, little real change has actually taken place in terms of business results.

• The average life span of a company is 40 years. Some researchers provide an even shorter estimate. It has been demonstrated that businesses can thrive for hundreds of years, so how can the average be so short?

Coaching and consulting can be intuition-based. And although there are many books theorizing about business success, leadership skills and human interaction, few have minimal, if any empirical support. The curve of our understanding of human behavior is a steeply accelerated one, and many are quickly being left behind.

Coaching with Your Brain in Mind is different. Presenting ideas, concepts and thought models supported by contemporary brain science allows you to create an expanded image of yourself in the business world. “I am not stuck in old models and concepts,” it says. “I am a contemporary thinker.”

Learn more about our 1-day seminar. Act now for early-bird pricing!

Some people are more emotionally reactive than others. “Sam” is often the most emotionally reactive person at work, and “Barbara” is often the most emotionally stable. “Sheila” seldom gets riled up, except when others are critical of her people’s performance, and then she’s impossible to deal with. These people feel quite different to us, but they are all common variants on the normal human continuum.

Some of us are born with a genetic predisposition toward emotional reactivity or stability. Starting with birth, personal experiences reinforce our emotional behavior. By the time we are an adolescent, we have a pretty stable personality, of which this – how emotional we are – is a key, visible component.

What can we do to deal with this? Is it okay to ignore Sam’s emotionality, since it seems to be constant? Do we just avoid criticizing Sheila’s people? Are we taking Barbara’s emotional stability for granted when we know she is experiencing stress? And let us not forget our own emotional reactions and the impact these reactions have on others.

Before judging people as “too” emotional, consider a quote from Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” We are not hard-wired for happiness. In fact, we are hard-wired to judge and blame others for our own discomfort with the world.

A great tool at our disposal is the Emotional Bank Account described by Stephen Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This concept outlines a general rule of 10:1 in our interactions with others. For every meaningful relationship, having ten positive interactions for every negative interaction means we are likely to reduce emotional reactions, increase trust and work through issues more quickly and effectively.

When someone is being emotional, ask yourself if they are getting the help they need. Can you see how they may feel they are “never” appreciated? Is their life outside of work difficult in some way that has exhausted their coping skills before they even get to work? Even when you have the “hard conversation” about what they are doing at work and the impact they are having, you can still be kind. Kindness is a way of demonstrating respect for their circumstance and resources. Kindness does not mean that you accept everything this person does. It does mean that you appreciate them as a human being and the struggles they are facing.

Kindness goes a long way to moving people forward in their own success.

Two important things happen when we sleep:

• Our memories, both short- and long-term, are consolidated into our memory networks in ways that allow us to more effectively access them in the future. This consolidation apparently builds the power of our intuition over time in ways that keep us safe, provide wisdom around certain issues, and provide a foundation for the coherent stories that make up our understanding of the world.

• The emotional energy associated with situations in our memories is processed and dissipated. You know from experience that when you are feeling disgruntled by a specific issue, you can “sleep on it,” often to good end. Tomorrow you may think more clearly and feel less agitated by that same situation.

Sleep is critical to our mental health . It is certainly no coincidence that most psychiatric disorders have as a feature sleep disruption.

Here is the part for you to sleep on now: the most important parts of this process happen in the final one-quarter to one-third of a “full night’s sleep,” typically defined as seven to nine hours. If you are sleeping less than 5 hours per night, it is likely that you are missing the best processing time for your long-term mental state.

Said another way, sleeping isn’t just for physical recuperation. It is also for brain processing and health.

Are you getting enough sleep?

• gather feedback about how the person being coached is doing;
• talk through that feedback with the person being coached;
• identify new and different skills or behaviors this person can practice to improve the perception of others; and
• reinforce this practice until new habits are formed.

Great success can be attained with this formula. More often, however, limited success comes from it. Most coaches will focus on understanding the person being coached – what they think, feel, say and do – as the foundation for change.

Inherent in this common model is the idea that other people’s perceptions define reality. Yet we all know that reality is different for different people. Two people can behave similarly in two separate parts of the organization, and one can be seen as a success, the other as struggling.

When coaches spend the time getting to know what is really going on in an organization, they can better judge how they can be helpful, at an individual level for the person being coached, and at a greater level for the company. In growing this knowledge, consider including strategy (what is the company trying to accomplish), business model (how do they make money), current financial performance, competitive pressures, the overall developmental stage of the company, as well as cultural norms that define behavior in the organization. Under all that seemingly respectful behavior, is there great tension and fear of failure? Are people allowed to undermine each other in the name of business results?

As a coach, the better you understand the organizational workings at play, the more helpful you can be in bringing about sustainable change. A new brain science perspective helps to expand your range of professional skills for learning and adapting the best ways to coach each individual.

Ask a leader what the biggest issue with the sick leave policy is and you are likely to hear, “employees who take advantage of it.” Drill further and examples include people who call in sick regularly on Monday or Friday, people who never just take one day off sick because the policy counts “incidents” not days, and eventually you will hear about the general unfairness of providing sick time to some when the healthy get nothing.

We’ll avoid that last item for another discussion.

As is often the case, it’s not the policy in question but the management of it. Let’s say you become aware that there appears to be a problem. First, now that it’s on your radar, do a reality check. You will have records – how often is he really gone on Monday or Friday? How does that compare to others in his work group or in the company? Like it or not, it could be that you don’t like something else about him and his calling in sick is what’s getting your clear attention. If you find yourself saying “always” or “never” about his behavior, there’s a clue that it’s more about you at this point than him.

However, let’s say this guy has been gone more Mondays and Fridays than any other employee in the company, and that the next closest guy has been at work 50% more Mondays and Fridays than him – in other words, there is clearly a pattern creating a troublesome issue. It’s probably time for a conversation! The conversation isn’t about illness – it is, in fact, skirting with legal constraints to even imply that the guy is sick too much. Obviously, you hope he’s not chronically sick – you wouldn’t wish a life like that on anyone.

The conversation is about reliability, honesty, and supporting his health. What are you trying to accomplish in his work group, and how does he fit in? Everyone is counting on him to be there, so when he is not there, others feel the impact. In raising this, he can now claim that he is actually sick that often, in which case now you handle this discussion as you would a disability. Does he need special accommodation for his recurring illness? Does it make sense for him to ask his doctor for a recommendation about accommodation that will allow him to get well and the work group to thrive?

This conversation is also an opportunity to provide a realistic preview about what success looks like in your organization. What does this guy hope is true about how he is seen as an employee? What does he hope his future looks like? If he cares about these things, helping him see how he can experience success is helpful. If he doesn’t care, at a minimum it helps him understand his future prospects better, and it provides you information to be your best not only for this employee but for all the employees in your group.

Do you have employees “taking advantage” of you? That part is about you.

Some believe that coming to work slows the healing process, so sick employees should stay home in order to get well. This message has a positive ring to it. Most employees agree with all of these sentiments, and think others should stay home when sick. However, people keep coming to work sick. Why don’t these people stay home and get well?

If you look around most workplaces, there is plenty of reinforcement for coming to work sick. Let us remember that our behavior is regularly shaped by reinforcement, which is much more complicated that telling people what you want (there is a good discussion in our book about reinforcement in Chapter 3 – download the book here). First and foremost, bosses typically do not send sick employees home. If you are one of these bosses, you have the right to do so, and it may be the best thing you can do for the individual, your team and your company.

Additionally, people come to work sick because they do not want to be seen as someone “not pulling their weight.” Companies downsizing, job scarcity, and lots of talk about “getting more with less” sends a clear signal to reinforce being at the workplace.

Perhaps also at play is the trend over the past couple of decades of combining all time off with pay – often called PTO for Paid Time Off – which can reinforce employees to show up sick so that their PTO can be used only for vacation days.

How do you reinforce people for taking good care of themselves? What are your messages about staying home when they are sick? What are the messages in your organization that help people overcome illness? And, finally, how do you handle your own episodes of illness? Most people will do what their boss does. Lead by example.

There is some brain science behind some of the elements of Wellness Programs, so that might be interesting.

• Some Wellness Programs effectively reduce the attention it takes for an individual to be able to show up and perform their work, at least for short periods of time. When you reduce decision making about going to the doctor, filling prescriptions, getting prescribed exercise and the like, you increase an employee’s ability to think about other things, perhaps having to do with his or her performance. Relentless cognitive demands leads to diminished performance (see Decision Fatigue: Not Everyone Experiences It Equally).
• We can’t totally confirm that exercise leads to better thinking, but a solid exercise regimen can lead to better health and better sleep. Good sleep – seven to nine hours of it each night – does lead to better thinking. As we sleep, our experiences of the day are integrated into our cognitive “map,” if you will, which helps memory and analysis.
• Meditation rooms, which have shown up in some Wellness Programs, bring both of these previous points together. Some will go there for a quick nap, making the sleep link. Others will go there to do some form of meditation. Regardless of how loosely defined “meditation” might be, shutting off cognitive demands helps rebuild cognitive resources for our next run at personal performance.

Many organizations intend with their Wellness Programs to take care of their employees in ways they hope will pay off. That seems like good thinking.