Liz Hall
The inability of some parts of the brain to connect directly has led to the development of our inner voice and our desire to talk things through and is one of the reasons why coaching is so effective.
Speaking at the ICF’s Neuroscience conference on 16 November, Patricia Riddell, reader in developmental neuroscience at the School of Psychology and CLS in Reading said. “It’s almost identical to apps in an iphone, every time we need to do something new, we develop a new module….The reason why the brain is wired so that we have an inner voice is so we can connect the different modules. And it’s at the heart of the coaching model because people need to talk things out,” she said. She gave the example of the ‘judging’ and ‘planning’ modules.
Dr Riddell also said we can train our inner voice to send messages to the nucleus accumbens- the reward centre of the brain- instead of the amygdala, and talk to it, acknowledging when we have done something stupid, for example, but concentrating on what we can learn from it.
She said we tend to be harsher about ourselves than others because we are wired to register and recall bad times to help us survive but that these days, this tends to mean us magnifying unimportant details. “We need to recognise we are very harsh with ourselves and that it’s not how other people see us, it’s not realistic. We’re so harsh because it’s a survival strategy so we really notice the bad times. It was developed for one thing and has become something different. We magnify the little things such as soap operas and no longer meet sabre toothed tigers.”
She likened our hippocampus to an address box. “The memories are representations of the event. When we relive it, we reactivate parts of the brain which is why visualisation works so well.” She said details of events that have happened to us, particularly embarrassing moments, are much more vivid than events of others. “We can’t judge what others will be really thinking of us because of this difference in detail.” To get round this, distance can be used such as reframing or imagining looking back 20 years later, she suggested. “They are all ways o tricking your brain into getting into the right level of detail. People’s ability to judge what other people think becomes more accurate when they put some distance in.”
We need to practice being positive about ourselves so this becomes “an anchor for us” that we can access quickly and give ourselves ways of knowing we have more options such as having friends advise us – or coaches coach us- as they won’t have the same level of detail.