In short, the brain is the command and control center running your life. It affects everything you do. Your brain generates your thinking power and therefore determines how well you perform at work or play. Your brain also influences your emotional well being. And while you may run, lift weights, or diet to keep your body in good condition, chances are you ignore your brain and trust it to do its job.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
Your brain is like a muscle. The more you use it, the more you can use it. And, the more you can stimulate the right neuron connections, the more you can prevent loss of capacity and memory. It follows, that optimizing your brain's function is essential to being the best you can.

With the aid of new brain imaging technology, recent breakthrough scientific findings have proved that, to the contrary, the adult brain has nerve cells capable of dividing and becoming healthy new cells -in fact, regenerating.

Neurogenesis is affected by mental exercises
Many external and environmental factors affect the capacity of neuronal cell birth. Increasing the levels of activity in the performance of specialized exercises has shown to not only stimulate new cell growth but, also increase a neuron’s ability for self-repair and therefore enhance mental sharpness. It also should be noted that increasing levels of stress and depression can cause the body to secrete corticosteroid hormones which act to inhibit neurogenesis by reducing the growth factor production, which is vital to new cell growth.

Neurogenesis (the production of new nerve cells) has been a revolutionary finding as it means that our cognitive function can be improved at virtually any stage in our life.

Structured mental exercises are already a routine part of cognitive development (delivered by qualified practitioners trained in the behavioral sciences eg; clinical psychologists) for those who have experienced mild or severe brain damage, developmental delays, short-term memory loss from strokes, brain surgeries, or other brain based anomalies. These cognitive exercises work by challenging the brain, stimulating the development of new connections that begins the rewiring process and forming new neuropathways that bridge over the damaged or underdeveloped part of the brain.

Performance Management and Professional Development: A Brain Workout with a Brain Trainer / Coach
-Pumping Neurons at the Brain Gym
It's long been recognized that mental activities such as; reading, crossword puzzles and brain teasers etc. can help improve some mental faculties. However, recent studies has shown that more targeted mental exercises (called Elementary Cognitive Tasks -ECT) are a more effective way to improve your cognitive functioning -such as the Mind WorkOut Coaching Tools provided in Dr Skiffington's Certified Master Coach Course

Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychology provide us the key, whilst Coaching provides us the deliver platform
By translating and reformatting the latest advances in the field of behavioral neuroscience together with proven psychological models of personal change into Mind WorkOut Coaching Methodology --coaches can now be provided simple and practical turn-key solutions that greatly increase their chances of effecting lasting positive change and generating significant advances in people's lives. 

Mind WorkOut Coaching Tools -Some Benefits

>Mind Coaching Tools

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Performance Management and Development:
     -Brain Gym Exercises
       -Short Course Brain Training Improves Cognitive Abilities for
        Years.

A recent major federally funded study has proved beyond a doubt that the cognitive functions can be enhanced through participation in short-course mind exercises.

In a landmark study published in the November 13, 2002, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association --it was found that two 1-hour training sessions a week for 5 weeks improved the reasoning, problem solving, concentration and memory skill sets of healthy independent adults who participated in the largest study of cognitive training conducted in the USA. The training not only improved the 2,802 participants' cognitive abilities, but the improvement persisted for 2 years after the training.

"The findings here were powerful and very specific," says Richard M. Suzman, Ph.D., Associate Director for the Behavioral and Social Research Program at NIA. At the outset, certified trainers conducted 10 sessions of 60 to 75 minutes over a 5- to 6-week period. All participants were assessed prior to training, immediately after training, and again 1 and 2 years later.

Immediately following the 5-week training period, the participants demonstrated reliable improvement on their respective cognitive ability. The training effects continued through 24 months, particularly for the participants who received some "booster" training. "The improvements in memory, problem solving, and concentration following training were sizeable," noted Karlene Ball, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the study's corresponding author.

>Mind Coaching Tools

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What can be done to preserve, even enhance, our mental
       fitness?
      -Mental Fitness: Exercises for The Brain

Just as physical exercise maintains body tone, strength, and endurance, mental exercise has positive conditioning effects for all people.

Use It or Lose It!
Not surprisingly, the same advice we follow to achieve physical fitness applies to mental fitness? -use it or lose it. Just as weight repetitions in the gym or jogging strengthen certain muscle groups, mental exercises can strengthen and enhance cognitive functions.

The French National Institute for Cerebral Research has confirmed that certain mental exercises can strengthen various mental abilities. Specifically, the Institute's Director Dr M. Le Poncin recommends an exercise regimen that focuses on building up abilities like perception, long- and short-term memory, and visuospatial, structuralization, logic, and verbal abilities. She advocates a technique of cerebral activation called "brain fitness."

"Brain Fitness" Workouts
The goal of brain fitness is to revive certain mental abilities before they slow down. In Dr Le Poncin's own words, "We simply develop the previously unknown fertility of land that had been lying fallow." According to Dr Le Poncin, mind exercises can be simple and fun to do and yield real progress in a relatively short time (after only a couple weeks of performing the exercises).

Dr Skiffington's Mind WorkOut Coaching Tools (underpinned by the latest advances in behavioral and neouroscience research) are categorized by the specific mental ability they are designed to strengthen. Graduates of her Certified Master Coach Course are trained to assist people to apply their enhanced mental skills upon the building up of the requisite personal and professional skills they require to be more successful in their life.

Sources:
Dr. Glickman-Simon (assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston) article 'Mental Fitness: Exercises for The Brain' for Brigham and Women's Hospital..American Psychological Association, Baltes, PB and Kliege,R. "On the Dynamics Between Growth and Decline in the Aging of Intelligence and Memory." Neurology. Poech K, et al., eds. Berlin and Heidelberg; Springer-Verlag 1986. Groneck, S and Patterson, R. Human Aging II: An Eleven-Year Biomedical and Behavioral Study. U.S. Public Health Service Monograph (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, 1971).

>Mind Coaching Tools

 

Behavioral Neuroscience -the Foundational Science:
-Some Important New Brain Facts

Brain Plasticity = the ability of the brain to “rewire” itself. This capability occurs predominately in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain right behind the forehead and above the eyes. They provide our sense of self-awareness, our will power, and our humanity. They enable us to plan, prioritize, conceive the future, to evaluate, and differentiate relevant from irrelevant information.

What you do and think can change the patterns of connections with the neural networks of your brain. The construct "life sculpts your brain" runs counter to the assumption that most, if not all, human behavior is already "hard-wired" through evolution and genetics. Instead, recent research in the field of behavioral neuroscience suggests
there are many ways we can all "sculpt" our own realities by knowing how to exercise our brains in certain ways, thus affecting the "patterns of connections between neurons. For example, learning new thinking skills actually builds stronger connections between brain cells, as neurons fire within the "trembling web" (the 100 billion brain cells that "make up 'you'"). Mental laziness and the use of habitual thinking patterns, on the other hand, can diminish the number and strength of these connections.

Intelligence, self-consciousness and "Brain Plasticity" together, give humans the unique capacity to progress and evolve within their own lifetimes. The smallest development in physical evolution takes many lifetimes, but mental evolution is much faster: an individual's nervous system and brain wiring is continually changing, adapting to the environment, and re-programming itself, throughout life. The more that is learned about the human brain, the more its capacities and potentials are found to go beyond earlier speculations.

This extraordinary, and until recently, unrecognized capacity our brains have for continually restructuring themselves holds great promise for all people -especially those with traumatic brain injuries. In some cases, neural networks that have been 90% damaged have reorganized into functioning systems again. They do so by “working around” the dead cells and joining together with surviving neighbours.

Neural networks that are derived from experience or practice will break down from disuse. This is why we may remember only snatches of old, familiar songs or experience a sense of “being rusty” at things we used to do so well. Brain cells don't whither away when unused. They are simply commandeered for other purposes. In weightless space, astronauts lose their kinesthetic sense of direction. Without gravity, they have no “this side up” cue. They have to depend entirely on their eyes to orient themselves as they float freely in the space shuttle. After an extended time in a space lab, they even lose the sense of their limbs. They have to look to see where their arms and legs are. This is why astronauts “walk funny” when they finally return to Earth. On average, it takes four to eight days for their brains to “rewire” under the influence of gravity.

Research with musicians who play string instruments have demonstrated that the musician has trained a larger than average part of their brain devoted to the fingers of their left hands This has resulted in a less than average sensitivity in their left palms.

One cost of “paying attention” or "focusing" is that activities in other areas of the brain are significantly reduced. When we listen intently, we become blind and numb to the world around us. When we focus on minute details, we lose sight of the big picture. We may get so lost in a book or a movie that we lose all sense of time and place. This effect is called “Hebbian learning,” after psychologist Donald Hebb.

The commandeering of brain cells which results in the acquisition of new skills can be disrupted if we are not allowed to dream. Although REM (rapid eye movement) sleep takes up just 20% of the night, research indicates that without such dreamtime learning and memory suffer. This is why cramming all night for a final may get us through the test but does nothing to enhance our understanding of the subject matter.

The same does not hold true if non-REM sleep is disrupted. We may be tired and cranky, but our memories will still function. Hence, it is not enough to “sleep on it,” we have to “dream on it” to make significant changes within our brains. 

A typical human brain functions on low capacity. Although the idea that a normal brain only uses 10% of its capacity is a myth, most people's brains are not functioning properly. For example, many studies show that the brains of many people, when confronted with a problem, will actually switch down gears and start working less or switch into a cognitive function area unsuited to manage the problem/issue! Instead of switching to logic and "work mode", the brain switches to patterns of frustration and emotion. Most people have simply not learned to "turn on" these higher cognitive abilities when the time is right. And, many people are unfamiliar with the levels of concentration and focus that may be required to succeed.

Brain Coaching
As might be expected, specialist mental skills coaching tools can provide a significant advantage when it comes to brain development. The more connections there are and the stronger those connections are, the closer a person is to fulfilling their potential. Sporadic or poorly organized learning/training is like knitting and then unravelling a sweater. It may keep us busy, but in the end nothing has been achieved.

The most effective form of learning, and subsequent brain restructuring, is coaching. The specially trained coach is a kind of external frontal lobe, selecting and highlighting what is significant, downplaying or even rejecting what is distracting. Dr Skiffington's Mind WorkOut Coaching Tools  (a series of  mind tools/exercises) are designed to do just that and more. Think of the WorkOut Tools as a full brain workout, cross-training and restructuring the brain to maximize potential naturally.

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.
  Read More >.... 

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Dr Skiffington
Behavioral Coaching Institute
New York, London & Sydney
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