Contents: performance coaching, business mental fitness, business mental skills, management performance, business thinking skills, business mental workouts, business mental fitness, executive coaching, coaching, business mental fitness workout, business mental skills, business mental workout course, business mental fitness tools, executive mental fitness, brain, management performance

 

Steps to a Better Performing Brain in the Workplace
-Executive & Business Performance Coaching
-Includes Extracts from: Issue 2501 of New Scientist Magazine, May 2005
 
 
 
Mental fitness workouts in the office:
It doesn't matter whether your a CEO or in sales and it doesn't matter how much education and training you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. There are lots of techniques, habits and tricks, as well as changes to your lifestyle and behavior that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells.
Step 1. Mental Workouts conducted by specially trained coaches 
           - "The key to unlocking brain power”
Put your mind to work in the right way and it can repay you and your company with impressive performance bonuses.

UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent research suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.

Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.

A team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found evidence that the neural systems that underlie working memory can grow in response to learning new skills. After five weeks of coaching, the participants brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).

Perhaps more significantly, when the Institute studied a group who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw an improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent. The Karolinska Institute team thinks working-memory skills coaching is a key to unlocking brain power.

Step 2.  Mindfulness

You can be smart, well-trained, creative and knowledgeable, but none of it is any use if your mind isn't on the job!

PAYING attention is a complex mental process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.

The first is to raise your arousal levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.

Concentrations Skills
There are mental exercises to deal with distractions. Some trained coaches routinely show executives how to recognise when their thoughts are wandering, catch and stop themselves and develop a valuable mindfulness habit. As any Zen meditator will tell you, concentration is as much a skill to be cultivated as it is a physiochemical state of the brain.

Some other helpful Steps include:
 Physical Exercise
Healthy Lifestyle
Diet Management
Good Sleeping Practices

Learn More
                                  ----------------------------------------------------

Senior Executives
-Get Your Brain in Shape
-National Education Association

Now, even if your a middle-aged executive and think your gray matter just isn't what it used to be, cast aside your doubts and embrace your brilliant future. "Scientists have let go of the idea that brain power peaks at age 5," says Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pittsburgh."The brain is very flexible," Nussbaum asserts. "We're able to learn throughout our entire life span."

Mental Workouts for senior management
-Train Your Brain.
Today, no professional or personal development program would be complete without exercises designed to stimulate specific cognitive skills. "The basic idea," says Lawrence Katz, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, "is that your brain has many untapped pathways." By stimulating those pathways in new ways (via specific cognitive exercises), you can increase the number and size of the brain's synaptic connections-its key electrical circuits. "An enriched environment," Nussbaum explains, contributes to ongoing neurogenesis (the growth of new brain cells or neurons) in adults and strengthens many of the brain's supportive structures. Benefits include better decision making, problem solving and creative thinking etc.

Increased Performance Levels
Best of all, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn to think clearer and faster. All it takes is a willingness to change, a little work, and some common sense. Structured mental exercises administered by a specially trained coach can teach you how to create your own enriched environment -a world in which you can easily improve your mind every working day. Improvement is naturally gradual but definite. Come a few months, you just may find yourself whizzing through complex deals and tasks with ease!

--Includes Extracts from: NEA, Apr 2005 

 

The Next Step >>

Performance coaching practices have evolved dramatically over the last few years and now leading-edge, industry-proven processes, tools and skills practice are available for both part-time and full-time coaches to become far more effective in helping people change themselves and their performance.

The Behavioral Coaching Institute's Certified Master Coach Course and the 'Manager as Coach' Course (licensed to graduates) provide the latest training in the use of evidence-based psychological methodologies to provide enhanced cognitive skills development:

Dr Skiffington's invitational, fast-tracked, 4 Day, Very Small Group Certified Master Coach Course (conducted in N.Y., London, Sydney etc) meets the critical needs for business and executive coaches to be trained and mentored in the use of validated, reliable psychology-based tools and techniques. And, Dr Skiffington's 'Manager as Coach' Training Program can be licensed by graduates of her Master Coach Course.   
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Behavioral Coaching Institute
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