This summer I’m reading “Peak Performance: Elevate Your Performance, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with The New Science of Success” by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. As a coach who works with her lawyer clients on making the shift from surviving to thriving, I am finding it full of useful insights and suggestions for putting into practice.
I wanted to share a little excerpt with you today about a straightforward practice (from chapter six of “Peak Performance”) for boosting your cognitive focus and ability:
Chade-Meng Tan is an engineer who brought mindfulness training while at Google. Establishing this cooperative and positive mindset isn’t merely about feeling good, it actually improves cognitive acuity. There have been many studies tracking the connection between mood, positive or negative, and mental acuity. The authors of “Peak Performance” point to a study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University. Researchers separated the participants into two groups according to how a participant identified their mood – positive or negative. The participants were then given challenging puzzles to do. Those in the positive group were much more likely to “solve challenging intellectual problems with creative insight.” To figure out why this resulted the researchers conducted fMRI brain scans while participants worked on the puzzles. They discovered that when participants experienced a positive mood, they demonstrated increased activity in the decision making and emotional control section of the brain. This is the part of the brain that is most important for problem-solving. Those in a negative mood showed little activity in this part of the brain.
Mood impacts cognitive ability. Positive feelings and thoughts stimulate the area of the brain we rely on for problem-solving.
Knowing this, we can prime ourselves for an enhanced performance like Chade-Meng Tan by intentionally focusing on the positive. It might be thinking about something nice about each of your colleagues, or performing a quick “what’s going well” practice (read more about this here) to identify three things that have gone well during the day. They can be anything from “I had a really nice hug from my daughter this morning” to “it was nice catching up with Anne over coffee.” Yes, when we are feeling stressed, tired, and low this can take effort. And it’s worth it because pushing our minds to do the work of making these positive connections makes us better at tackling tough intellectual challenges. And let’s face it, legal practice is full of them!
