Your Brain is Tired. Make Space for Change.

Your Brain is Tired.
Make Space for Change.

If you read my post from last week about balancing ideas and strategy, I mentioned the need for an off-leash area, a place to take the future thinking, inspiring stuff, and let it run free. I made the case that time dedicated to this kind of thinking actually allows your team to connect the future to the now, and sometimes accidentally solve problems from a new perspective. We need to make space for personal growth and attunement because otherwise our brains start to fail. Here are some great resources if you’re interested in exploring this further.

Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander—therapist and conductor respectively—suggest in their book, The Art of Possibility, that we reframe our achievements outside of the realm of what can be quantifiably measured, and instead think of work through a lens of how you contribute.

Stewart Friedman, the author of Total Leadership, a book based on his research and teaching at the Wharton School of Business, defends our need as leaders to seek out “four-way wins” that integrate work, home, community and self. He speaks about it eloquently in this video, that integrating all of these aspects of an individual life does not have to result in a sacrifice or a trade-off.

Srini Pillay, author of, Tinker, Dabble, Doodle,Try, and a Harvard-trained practicing psychiatrist and brain-imaging researcher, discusses the benefit of nurturing the unfocused brain. An overly-focused brain will limit the activation of our pre-frontal cortex—the moral center—of our brain, causing us to make decisions without full consideration of their greater, human implications. Yikes!

So at More Belief, we have created a day where we focus on building a beginner’s mindset around new creative work for its own right. Even rearranging your office space to be more conducive to a creative mindset can be effective. As a lifelong creative, I have to go back to the well in this way or I’ll lose my connection to the bigger truths that guide my service to clients. It’s not as selfish as it seems.

So on the top left here are drawings that came out of this Wednesday from tapping the well inside myself. It allowed me to dig into Photoshop brushes, and learn some new painting techniques I haven’t been able to explore with clients directly. But more than anything, it helped me realign with my origin. The two drawings below are the work created by Jake Rudegeair, as he listened to his favorite science fiction podcasts, Imaginary Worlds.

Spend some time in an off-leash area this week. Build alignment on your team that this is a crucial part of your ability to serve clients well.