14. Meet Your Brain (Part 1)

You are listening to The Success Minded Woman podcast with Deidrea Kiesling, episode 14. Today I am going to be talking all about how to use your brain to get what you want so stay tuned.

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hello, welcome back to the show. So I need some help, some input from you all. I have been listening to a lot of podcasts over the years and they all sometimes have a special intro that they say like The Life Coach School Podcast, she says, “Hello my friends.” I also listen to my business coach, Stacey Boehman and she says, “Hey coaches.” And I haven't come up with my intro of how to address you all and say hello. So let me know if you have any ideas because I keep struggling with this at the beginning of every episode. I don't know exactly what to call you all. So for now I’ll just say, “Hi, you all.”

What I have for you today and over the next couple of episodes is one of my favorite things to talk about. Not because it's really that exciting or interesting but because it’s game changing in how you go after your goals and how you experience yourself in your life. So what I'm calling this series which I think will probably be three or four episodes is called Meet Your Brain. And your brain is the biggest asset that you have in your life when you're going after your goals and dreams and just living your best life and being your best self.

And your brain can be your biggest liability because your brain is designed to keep you safe and keep you comfortable and it has evolved over time. But the main part of our brain is not designed to help us go after our goals and dreams. So one of the things that I want to teach you over the next couple of episodes is really how to use your brain as your asset. And I believe that the more you understand how it works and what it’s doing and why it’s doing that, the easier it is to recognize it and then overcome that programming that our brains automatically do so that we can get out of our comfort zone and achieve our goals and dreams.

So I am by no means a neuroscientist or any kind of degrees in any of this. So this is very basic elementary school level understanding. This is my understanding of things. So don’t quote me on this. This is just my own general understanding of these concepts and I'm going to break them down as simply as I can because to me it's good to understand this just in its basic. So basically our brain, it only weighs about three pounds but it takes up 20% of our energy. I used to think that the only things that really used energy were exercise. I didn’t know our brain uses a lot of energy.

So when you're in deep work, when you're really studying or reading or even doing deep thinking or design for your business of being in a creative project or process, that is taking up a lot of your actual energy. And so that's one of the things that's important to know is just that when you're doing a lot of deep work it's going to require energy. And so that’s one thing that I wanted you to know, just the facts that our brain actually takes up a lot of energy. So the things that I want to tell you, I’m going to kind of do an overview. And then I’m going to go through some different concepts that I want you to know.

And I want you to know also that I’m in the process of teaching these concepts to my kids because when I was preparing for this and as I do my coaching calls with my clients, I kept thinking I wish that I had known this sooner. This is not something that’s taught in school. And now that I know it and now that I’m implementing it in my life and teaching my clients how to implement it in their life, then I really want to teach my kids how this works. And they may or may not implement it in their life because I’m their mother and they don't necessarily want to listen to me.

But I can model for them my understanding of these concepts. So the first thing that I want to tell you is your brain, there’s a lot of parts to it. And we’re not going to get into all the details of that. I just want to keep it really, really basic. And so basically there’s these three main parts of our brain. There is the primitive brain which is the amygdala and that’s in the very back part of our brain. So right above your shoulders, right at the top of your brain stem. That's your primitive brain. That's your amygdala. This is the oldest part of our brain and this is fight or flight or freeze, this is the stress response comes from our amygdala.

And it’s so good to know that when you're in a stress response, so when you're in a fight, flight, freeze reaction to something, you're in your primitive brain. So you're not really thinking. You're really reacting from your primitive brain. The second part of your brain, the mammalian brain is the middle part and this is where all of our feelings and emotions are.

And then the third part of our brain, this is the prefrontal cortex and this is the front part of your brain. So if you were to touch your forehead above your, I’m doing this now trying to explain this, above your nose, above your eyebrows in the middle, that part of your forehead, that is your prefrontal cortex. And this is your higher level thinking. This is the latest part of our brain that was evolved. And so it’s the newest part of our brain function as a human species. And this is the part of our brain that’s used for higher level thinking. This is the CEO. This is the boss of our thinking, the Chief Executive Officer you could say of your brain.

And actually in cognitive psychology it's actually called your executive processing center. And its executive function is one of the things that happens in your prefrontal cortex. So this is decision making. This is planning. This is future thinking. This is being proactive instead of reactive. This is being more thoughtful and responsive. So this is when you’re calm, when you're collected, when you're in charge. When you're not emotional you're in your prefrontal cortex.

And I love this saying from Grant Cardone. I heard him say this many years ago and now that I understand this part about how the brain works, it makes so much sense. But Grant says, “High emotion, low intelligence.” And what he's saying really is that when you’re in high emotion you're in your primitive brain, you're in your amygdala. And so you're not using your prefrontal cortex. It’s kind of like one or the other, when one's really activated the other kind of goes offline. So when you're really activated in your amygdala, in your primitive brain, your prefrontal cortex, that CEO, that executive function is kind of offline and you’re being controlled by your primitive brain.

When you’re calm and your amygdala, your primitive brain is calm and you're in your prefrontal cortex that is where you can make decisions. That’s when you have high intelligence and that's when you can really move your life and your business forward, when you’re operating from your prefrontal cortex. So I just love that quote, ‘high emotion, low intelligence’. And so the opposite of that is high intelligence, low emotion is when you're operating from your prefrontal cortex.

So just, it's just something so good to know that when you're feeling frustrated or overwhelmed or stressed or anxious and you're trying to make decisions or you’re trying to do things in your life or in your business and you're frustrated and it's not working. It may be because you're being activated in your primitive brain and you're not totally getting your prefrontal cortex, your CEO on board. And so you're having this kind of struggle of going back and forth.

And so one of the things and I'm not going to go into it in this episode and I definitely want to bring in an expert to help us all with this. But is a way to bring yourself into calm and relax from that stress response, when we’re in that fight, flight or freeze in our primitive brain. So I’m definitely not the one to train or teach on that. I’m definitely a student when it comes to all of this but I definitely want to share with you more about this in coming episodes.

So those are the three parts of the brain. And now the next concept that I want to tell you is that there is this concept called the motivational triad. And that's just a way to describe the function of that primitive brain. The reason it said motivational triad is there’s three things that your primitive brain is motivated by, to seek pleasure, to avoid pain and to conserve energy, be as efficient as possible. And because our primitive brain is designed to keep us safe and to keep us safe it wants to control our activities to do these three things. To seek pleasure, to avoid pain and to conserve energy.

And this was great when we were all living in caves or out on the savannah, keeping us safe and warm and on the lookout for danger. But in today's modern world, this is actually if you think about it, seek pleasure, avoid pain, conserve energy, be as efficient as possible. This is actually our comfort zone, getting pleasure from eating junk food, watching TV or scrolling on social media while lying on the couch and being entertained. It’s basically what used to be designed for our safety and for us to evolve as humans is now actually keeping us trapped in our comfort zone.

And it's hard to overcome that because that is actually how we’re designed. But in our modern world it's exactly the opposite, doing those things, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, conserving energy, that can actually keep us stuck. And that can actually make us not safe because we are not going out in the world and doing our work and showing up for our life and showing up for our dream and for our goals. So it’s just so good to know that that motivational triad, it's always there, it’s always working.

And it's our job as dreamers, as goal getters, to overcome our primitive programming and being aware of it and knowing what’s happening while you're in it is really going to help you. And what I love to say is when you catch yourself or when I catch myself in one of these comfort zone stalls is that it’s just my primitive brain. That’s just what my brain is designed to do. And then it's my job to override that. And you don’t have to do it all the time, of course, we want to have comfort, we want to have safety.

And that's why I really like to have breaks, have rest, have maybe a plateau in your goal getting where you kind of take a break and just relax and ease into your goals that you’ve achieved so far and getting ready to go to the next one. So just like when they’re climbing Mount Everest how they have those base camp and then they go up and they get to another base camp and they get to another base camp. And that’s what we should do with our goals is get out of our comfort zone, we override our motivational triad and we push, we get out of our comfort zone and we take a lot of action and we get some results.

And then we can take a break, get to a new base camp, rest, recover, regroup and then we can go again. And so one of the things that I like to do is incorporate these rest cycles, this base camp cycle whenever I'm going after a goal, just to know that that’s part of it. Knowing the motivational triad is really going to be important for you to know that it’s not you, it’s your brain. It’s just doing what it’s supposed to do. And then it's our job to understand that and then override it when it makes sense to do that.

Okay, so the next concept that I want to share with you is that we as humans are storytellers. We are meaning making machines. As humans we are designed to make meaning out of our experiences. It's how we connect the dots. It’s how we interpret all of the life events. It’s how we actually when we see things, it’s how we make meaning out of them, is creating a story and then making sense of what we see based on the story that we’re telling ourselves and the meaning that we’re making.

So it’s good to know that that’s just part of the design that we are going to make meaning and we’re going to create stories and that can be to our benefit and also to our demise because we are programmed to create stories and to create meaning but it’s not necessarily true. So that’s where we have to come in with our prefrontal cortex and question the stories that we’re telling ourself, question the meaning that we’re making out of our past, out of our current situations, out of our interactions with people.

We have to really question the meaning that we’re making from different experiences and then decide on purpose what story we want to tell and what meaning we want to make.

Okay, so the next thing that I want to share with you is this concept called the reticular activating system, aka RAS. And I first learned about this from Tony Robbins and he mentioned it in, I don’t know, a class I was doing or something. And then since then and actually this is an example of it. Once I learned the concept I started noticing it and hearing a lot of speakers talking about it and seeing him on YouTube videos and having people mention it in podcasts. And that is actually an example of RAS.

And so what it is, is that when you think of something, you’re telling your brain what to look at. So your reticular activating system, it's activating you to go out and look for that. So your brain is going to go and find it that, whatever you're thinking and it's going to bring it to you. So the example, my kids like to play yellow car banana. Do you all know what this is? When we’re driving and you see a yellow car, they say, “Yellow car banana.” And they hit, not hit, hit, but tap but sometimes a little too hard, one of their siblings and say, “Yellow card banana.” And it’s just this game that they play and we supposedly have a rule, don't hit the driver.

But anyway, so when we’re out and they’re playing yellow car banana, then all of a sudden we’re seeing yellow cars. When we’re not playing yellow car banana, I don’t know that we ever notice the yellow cars. So it’s just one of those things like when you're shopping for something. Then all of a sudden you’re noticing it everywhere. Now, in today’s world where there is all these ads on Facebook and it’s tracking your activity online. It’s actually real life reticular activating system because if you go to a website and then it's sending something on your Facebook, it's actually, I mean that’s technology actually recreating this reticular activating system.

But just know that it’s kind of like whatever you put in your mind to look for, your brain is designed to go and get it. And that's why we want to just pay so much attention to what we’re telling ourself, what we’re telling our brain to look out for because it is going to find what we’re searching for.

The next concept that I want to share with you is called confirmation bias. And basically our brain, as part of wanting to keep us safe, it wants to be right. And basically it wants to be correct about its assumptions. So it wants to have a bias towards being correct, for confirming any kind of hypothesis or assumption. And because our brain wants to be right, by default we have this confirmation bias. This is why it's hard to listen. This is why it's hard to consider another point of view, because our brain is actually programmed. We have a confirmation bias to be right, to find evidence to confirm what we believe to be true.

And so just by default we are programmed to kind of be closed down for other ideas or opinions that don’t align with what we think and believe. And again it's just so good to know that we have this confirmation bias. And so when we have a hypothesis, let's say about something we want or the way we’re being in the world or how someone else is. We are telling our brain to go on the lookout to confirm that assumption, because our brain wants to prove it true whatever we are thinking. So that's why, again and you'll hear me talk about this so much in this podcast.

It is so important to be intentional with what we’re thinking, what we’re saying because we are giving our brain direction to find the things that we are saying. So if you are saying that something is wrong your brain will go out and find all the ways that that is true. If you say that something is right, your brain is going to go out and find all the ways that that is true. So it’s so important that we take responsibility for what we’re thinking and saying and to use our brain as our ally, as an asset instead of having it work against us.

And that's why I wanted to share all of this with you because once we know all of this about how our brain works and that this is how it was designed, it was designed to keep us safe. But now we have to kind of overcome a lot of our primitive programming and our natural way a brain was designed to operate in our modern world, to get out of our comfort zone to create the life and business of our dreams to achieve the goals that we are going for.

And the next thing that, this is a big one, negativity bias. So our brain tends toward the negative to be on the lookout for danger. So we are by default programmed to be negative and that is part of our design, to be on the lookout for danger, to keep us safe. So if you think about if you were wanting to make sure that you're safe and you felt like you were in some kind of threatening environment you would be looking for danger. You would be looking out behind, if you were hiding behind the couch or whatever you were doing to keep safe, you would be on the lookout for negative things.

And that is how our brain works. we have a bias towards the negative. So we have it with ourself as well. We are programmed to find the negative in ourselves, in our environment and in other people because our brain is trying to keep us safe. So we have to train our brain to override all of this programming to know, okay, my brain is designed for negativity, it has a negativity bias so I'm going to think on purpose and tell my brain, “Go out and find all of these things of why this is true.” So that’s where you can start giving your brain instructions and start using these different ways that the brain works for your advantage instead of as your disadvantage.

Another thing that our brain does is certainty seeking. As humans we don't want to be uncertain. We want to know what's happening. We want to feel safe and certain that we know what's happening, that we know what's going on, that we know what to expect. So we’re certainty seeking. And again that’s your comfort zone, knowing that you’re safe, knowing that you’re comfortable, knowing what's going to happen, getting in your status quo of life, rinsing and repeating every day, every year. You're certain and you know what to expect.

So knowing that we’re certainty seeking and as big dreamers and goal getters, we are by default going into uncertainty. We’re stepping out and we are uncertain about what’s going to happen. And so again, you have to know that that’s just your programming. When you're feeling doubt and overwhelm and confusion your brain is wanting to have certainty. It’s seeking certainty and when you’re trying to get out of your comfort zone and go for those big goals and dreams, your brain is freaking out because it is not certain. It is scared and you are getting out of your comfort zone and you are getting out of your safety.

And so it’s just so good to know that this is what is happening and that's why. It’s hard to get out of your comfort zone. And that’s why you have to create discipline and the mindset to override this primitive programming to go after your goals.

Next week we’re going to get more into the thoughts that you're thinking and how to think on purpose to create the results that you want. So thanks for listening and I’ll see you all next week. Bye.

If you love what you’re learning here on the podcast and you want to start implementing these concepts into your daily life then you must get my free course where I will teach you how to get 10 hours back a week. Imagine what you could create with 10 more hours a week. So go to thedreamacademy.com/freecourse and learn about the magic wand of time. Thanks for listening. Bye.