In my wife Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind-Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Habits, she explains recent neuroscience research on how our habits form in  the first place, why they are so hard to alter, and smart tactics for replacing dysfunctional ones with more effective ways of being in the world.

One concept that helps us understand how habits operate is “modes.” These are overall orchestrations of emotional habits that include how we perceive situations and kneejerk ways of acting and interacting.

We each have our personal set of triggers that unleash these modes. In the anxious mode, for instance, we are hyper-sensitive to anything that suggests an important relationship is being threatened, and over-react.

Every mode makes us a different person for the time being. In a controlling mode, for instance, we dictate to others what we think they should do, oblivious to how this makes them feel.

Such modes of being are counter-productive in a leader, parent, or spouse.  But because habits are so strong once we learn them, people are often at a loss about how to stop themselves from going through the same self-defeating routines all over again – or don’t even see that there’s anything wrong.

But the neuroscience of habit also tells us how we can go about changing them. To learn more, you might want to look at Mind Whispering. It will be released tomorrow, April 23.

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But then when she was part of a group touring the labyrinths of Europe, a friend from her workplace who also went reported – a bit shocked – that the woman was nothing like her usual self. She took initiative and explored strange cities on her own, was emotionally stable, and fun to be with.

All of us are different people in different situations, or with varied groups, or from time to time, and at various stages of our lives. The old personality model, that we have fixed traits that stay with us throughout our lives, doesn’t do justice to how flexible our behavior can be.

Traits have long been used to pigeonhole people in the workplace, for everything from hiring to placing people in the “right” job.

But today brain science tells us our brains are “plastic” – they can change with the right development experience – and they are far more elastic than the trait idea gives credit to.

“Modes” are a new concept that lets us understand how and why we actually are diverse people at various times. A mode orchestrates our entire way of being: how we perceive and interpret the world, how we react – our thoughts, feelings, actions and interactions.

For example, there’s the avoidant mode, where we try to distance ourselves from feelings and people; the anxious mode, where we over-worry our relationships – and the secure mode, where we can take in emotions with calm, feel secure in ourselves and are able to take smart risks, and can focus in ways that help us be at our best.

The liberating effect of thinking about modes rather than “personality types” is that modes come and go. We can learn what triggers our modes, what makes some self-defeating ones so sticky, and what can help us loosen their grip and get into the best modes for top performance.

Modes and how they work for or against us is the topic of Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Emotional Habits. The mode concept builds on a recent proposal by the founder of cognitive therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck, who suggested that what we call depression or anxiety disorders are modes that can change for the better.

Seeing someone else – or ourselves – through the lens of a label like “depressed” or “introvert” can have a subtle negative impact, suggesting a permanence that modes belie. The mode idea builds around what we can do to release the grip of our dysfunctional modes and build a wider set of emotional choices for ourselves.

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People not being fully present is a big problem because the most effective interactions occur when two people are mutually present to each other. That’s when rapport happens. That’s when chemistry happens. That’s when you’re going to have the most powerful communication and mutual understanding. If your attention is over there, it means you’re not over here with the person you’re with.

Lack of attention also impacts your performance. Your ability to do your job on your own is directly related to how well you can concentrate and focus. If you’re continually distracted, you just can’t get it done, or get it done well.

That’s why one of the most important things to learn in the workplace today is how to focus. Mindfulness meditation techniques can help you strengthen your attention.

I’ve found that if you do these exercises, for example, 10 minutes before you go to work, you are changing your brain. You’re heightening your ability to concentrate hours later. If you can find a way to practice strengthening your attention every day, it’s like going to the gym and building your muscles, but it’s a mental muscle.

Here’s an exercise from the concentration family of meditation. It’s a good introduction to mindfulness.

• Sit upright, close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath.
• Don’t try to control your breath, just let it be natural and easy but be aware of your breath.
• Notice the full inhalation, the full exhalation.
• See if you can feel it coming and going through your nostrils, or feel the rise and fall of your belly.
• When you notice that you’ve been distracted, simply start with the next breath.
• Tune in to any sensation any way you can. Be fully aware of the breath. Just keep your attention anchored there.
• Keep breathing in, and breathing out.
• Whenever your mind wanders, just bring it back to your breath.
• Watch the full inhalation, the full exhalation. Stay with the breath. Use it as your anchor for attention.
•  Try it on your own for a few minutes.

It’s really so simple and in some ways so hard, because the mind wants to wander. In a way the basic movement of mindfulness is anchoring your attention, keeping it there, noticing when your mind wanders because it’s going to, bringing it back and starting over. What we find is that if you can keep doing this, and the longer you stay with your breath, the more relaxed your body becomes. It’s a side effect of that full attention and letting go all those worries that keep us on edge and distracted.

For more about mindfulness in the workplace, watch my recorded webinar with Google’s Search Inside Yourself adviser, Mirbai Bush. You can also learn more mindfulness-based techniques for work with Mirabai’s latest CD Working with Mindfulness.

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The “how” is in my wife Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Habits. She’s drawn on several strands of understanding about upgrading the human mind, from Eastern psychologies and mindfulness, to neuroscience and cognitive therapy – and even some lessons she’s learned from studying with a horse whisperer.

I’ve found her analyses of what can go wrong in our lives, and how to put it on the right track, personally useful, and helpful in my relationships – and marriage. It’s made me more mindful of how I’m being, and by giving me tools for changing in the moment, helped me stay on a better track.

For coaches, Mind Whispering offers a new template for working with your clients, and a solid menu of methods for helping them. Same for counselors and therapists – and anyone who wants to improve their life in general.

Tara and I will be giving workshops on Mind Whispering in the next few months in Lenox, MA; Minneapolis; Los Angeles; the San Francisco Bay area; Rhinebeck, NY; and Oxford, England for those who want some hands-on experience with this new approach to working with our minds.

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The new understanding is what’s called ‘neurogenesis’: Every day the brain generates 10,000 stem cells that split into two. One becomes a daughter line that continues making stem cells, and the other migrates to wherever it’s needed in the brain and becomes that kind of cell. Very often that destination is where the cell is needed for new learning. Over the next four months, that new cell forms about 10,000 connections with others to create new neural circuitry.

The state of the art in mapping this will be coming out of labs like Richard Davidson’s that have massive computing power, because new, innovative software tools for brain imaging can now track and show this new connectivity at the single-cell level.

Neurogenesis adds power to our understanding of neuroplasticity, that the brain continually reshapes itself according to the experiences we have. If we are learning a new golf swing, that circuitry will attract connections and neurons. If we are changing a habit – say trying to get better at listening – then that circuitry will grow accordingly. On the other hand, when we try to overcome a bad habit, we’re up against the thickness of the circuitry for something we’ve practiced and repeated thousands of times.

So what are the brain lessons for coaching, or for working on our own to enhance an emotional intelligence skill?

First, get committed. Mobilize the motivating power in the left prefrontal areas. If you’re a coach, you’ve got to engage the person, get them enthused about achieving the goal of change. Here it helps to draw on their dreams, their vision for themselves, where they want to be in the future. Then work from where they are now on what they might improve to help them get where they want to go in life.

If you can, at this point it’s helpful to get 360-degree feedback on the emotional intelligence competencies. It’s best to use an instrument that measures the emotional intelligence abilities, and lets you ask people whose opinions you value rate you anonymously on specific behaviors that reflect the competencies of star performers and leaders. A trained consultant can help you use this feedback to determine what competencies you would most benefit from strengthening.

Next, get practical. Don’t take on trying to learn too much all at once. Manage your goal at the level of a specific behavior. Make it practical, so you know exactly what to do and when. For example, say someone has “smartphone syndrome”. You have to break the habit of multi-tasking. So the person might make up an intentional learning plan that says something like: at every naturally occurring opportunity – when a person walks into your office, say, or you come up to a person – you turn off your cell phone and your beeper, turn away from your computer, turn off your daydream or your preoccupation and pay full attention. That’s gives you a precise piece of behavior to try to change.

What will help with that? Noticing when a moment like that is about to come, and doing the right thing. Doing the wrong thing is a habit that you have become an Olympic level master at – your neural wiring has made it a default option, what you do automatically. The neural connectivity for that is strong. When you start to form the new, better habit you are essentially creating new circuitry that competes with your old habit in a kind of neural Darwinism. To make the new habit strong enough, you’re got to use the power of neuroplasticity – you have to do it over and over again.

If you persist in the better habit, that new circuitry will connect and become more and more powerful, until one day you’ll do the right thing in the right way without a second thought. That means the circuitry has become so connected and thick that this is the brain’s new default option. With that change in the brain, the better habit will become your automatic choice.

For how long and how many times does an action have to be repeated until it’s actually hard-wired? A habit begins to be hard-wired the very first time you practice it. The more you practice it, the more connectivity. How often you have to repeat it so that it becomes the new default of the brain depends in part on how strong the old habit is that it will replace. It usually takes three to six months of using all naturally occurring practice opportunities before the new habit comes more naturally than the old.

Another practice opportunity can occur whenever you have a little free time: mental rehearsal. Mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuitry as does the real activity. This is why Olympic athletes spend off-season running through their moves in their brain – because that counts as practice time, too. It’s going to increase their ability to perform when the real moment comes.

Richard Boyatzis has used this method with his MBA students for years at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. And he’s followed these students into their jobs as much as seven years later – and found the competencies they had enhanced in his class were still rated as strong by their co-workers.

Learn more about the latest scientific research on EI in my book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights from More Than Sound.

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How does managing emotions come into play when building high-performing teams? I spoke with IMD professor, George Kohlrieser for my Leadership: A Master Class series about the importance of a leader’s EI skills in creating solid, dynamic bonds within a team.

“Managing emotions is how you build a team, an organization. It’s the ability to get team members inspired. It’s about dealing with emotions, building high emotions and creating an inspired team. If you’ve ever been in a high performing team, it just inspires, even though there’s stress and challenge. And there’s always going to be a leader, as part of that process, to build that creativity. So it’s essential for leaders to understand how team bonding works, and how bonding in a team will build energy.

Sense of belonging

The leader has to make everybody feel like they belong – even if you don’t like them. Of course, typically after creating a bond you learn to like the person. You discover some part of them that brings you together. With team members who don’t want to belong, you have to put the fish on the table and say, “Do you really want to belong to this team? If you are ambivalent, it’s going to be a source of conflict.”

Build mutual respect

Again, if you don’t like somebody, it’s OK, but you have to show respect, and you create high energy by being respectful. Use your mind’s eye like a flashlight to look for what you can learn from somebody.

Offer choice

People want to feel they have power over themselves. That’s why asking a question is so important in any leadership activity, and being able, where possible, to give people choice and power over what they can do. When you delegate, you open up possibilities to let people shine. Think of it like your children. You want your children to be smarter than you. You want the people who follow you to be smarter than you, to do better than you. If you create that sense of support, that foundation, then you have these explosions of creativity.

Empathy in bonding

Being able to understand grief is very important. When people don’t get over something, there’s going to be a negative consequence somewhere up the road. Help everyone – including you – get over whatever happened. The future is the future. The past is the past. Put the fish on the table to deal with conflicts. Understand that it’s better to be slapped in the face by the truth than kissed by a lie. Be a leader who says the truth, but say it with empathy. Say it with bonding, because tough leaders who bond get good results from their teams.”

Learn more emotionally-intelligent leadership skills in my Leadership: A Master Class video series from More Than Sound.

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This heightened activity focuses on the temporal area, a center on the side of the right neocortex. This is the same brain area that interprets metaphor and “gets” jokes. It understands the language of the unconscious what Freud called the “primary process”: the language of poems, of art, of myth. It’s the logic of dreams where anything goes and the impossible is possible.

That high gamma spike signals that the brain has a new insight. At that moment, right hemisphere cells are using these longer branches and connections to other parts of the brain. They’ve collected more information and put it together in a novel organization.

What’s the best way to mobilize this brain ability? It’s first to concentrate intently on the goal or problem, and then relax into stage three: let go. The converse of letting go – trying to force an insight – can inadvertently stifle creative breakthrough. If you’re thinking and thinking about it, you may just be getting more tense and not coming up with fresh ways of seeing things, let alone a truly creative insight.

So to get to the next stage, you just let go. Unlike the intense focus of grappling with a problem head-on, the third stage is characterized by a high alpha rhythm, which signals mental relaxation, a state of openness, of daydreaming and drifting, where we’re more receptive to new ideas. This sets the stage for the novel connections that occur during the gamma spike.

Those moments of out-of-the-blue, spontaneous creative insights may seem to come out of nowhere. But we can assume that the same process has gone on, where there was some degree of engagement in a creative problem, and then during “down time” neural circuits make novel associations and connections. Even when creative insights seem to arise on their own, the brain may be going through the same moves as during the three classical stages.

On the other hand, I would guess that the three or four classical stages of creativity are somewhat of a useful fiction – the creative spirit is more freewheeling than that. I think the main neural action is between intense focus on the problem and then relaxing about it. And when that creative idea arrives, it’s almost certain that the brain has gone through that same heightened pitch of gamma activity that was found in the lab.

Is there a way to create the conditions whereby the gamma spike is more likely to occur? Gamma spikes normally come at random – they can’t be forced. But the mental stage can be set. The pre-work for the gamma spike includes defining the problem, then immersing yourself in it. And then you let it all go – and it’s during the let-go period that that gamma spike is most likely to arise, along with that “Aha!” moment, the light bulb over the head of a cartoon figure.

There’s a physical marker we sometimes feel during a gamma spike: pleasure. With the “Aha!” comes joy. Then there’s that fourth stage, implementation, where a good idea will either sink or swim. I remember talking to the director of a huge research lab. He had about 4,000 scientists and engineers working for him. He told me, “We have a rule about a creative insight: if somebody offers a novel idea, instead of the next person who speaks shooting it down – which happens all too often in organizational life – the next person who speaks must be an ‘angel’s advocate,’ someone who says, ‘that’s a good idea and here’s why.’”

Creative ideas are like a fragile bud – they’ve got to be nurtured so they can blossom.

Learn more about maximizing your brain states at work with my book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights from More Than Sound.

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I’ve got a way to slow warming: Handprinter. I’ve just donated to their Kickstarter campaign. Here’s why.

We’ve all heard about our carbon footprints, the sum total of all the carbon dioxide released as we go through a day: driving, making meals, heating our houses and workplace, washing our clothes and dishes, and on and on. The global impact of all such human activity, we’re told, endangers our future as a species.

If you start tracking your carbon footprint, the data can be downright depressing.  When Gregory Norris, the industrial ecologist who invented Handprinter, has his students at the Harvard School of Public Health measure their footprint, many tell him, “The planet would be better off if I never had been born.”

Instead of tracking all the bad news about our carbon footprint, Handprinter puts a positive spin on our environmental impacts, tracking all the good we do.  With Handprinter you measure every action you take that lowers your carbon footprint, and keep growing that number.

If you can get friends to do what you’ve done, you get credits for that, too. A school, store, company, or family can track their handprint – and compete to make theirs the biggest.

Handprints can make us feel good about what we’re doing, and encourage us to do more to lower our carbon impact. As a psychologist, this makes great sense to me: instead of de-motivating folks with their footprint, keep them enthused and working on building their handprint.

Handprinter.org is the beta website; the Kickstarter campaign is for a mobile web app-in-progress. A smart way to help keep the planet a bit cooler.

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A: Self-awareness means the ability to monitor our inner world – our thoughts and feelings.  Mindfulness is one method for enhancing this essential capacity – it trains our attention to notice subtle, but important signals, and to see thoughts as they arise rather than just being swept away by them.  Google University has built a course on this – one of its creators, Mirabai Bush has an instructional audio I recommend, Working with Mindfulness

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Social competence takes many forms – it’s more than just being chatty. These abilities range from being able to tune into another person’s feelings and understand how they think about things, to being a great collaborator and team player, to expertise at negotiation. All these skills are learned in life. We can improve on any of them we care about, but it takes time, effort, and perseverance. It helps to have a model, someone who embodies the skill we want to improve. But we also need to practice whenever a naturally occurring opportunity arises – and it may be listening to a teenager, not just a moment at work.

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