The Real Deal: Our Three Brains

There is no doubt in my heart, mind and gut that this topic is going to be the next ‘big thing’ in business and interpersonal psychology.

Esoteric teachings and practices dating back 2,500 years ago always put great emphasis on checking into one’s own innate intelligence, following “the wisdom of the heart” and “the wisdom of the gut”. Heard it all before, we might think.

But it is only in recent years where technology and modern neuroscience have advanced enough to enable this wisdom to actually come to life, and hard science presents to us that our body actually has not one, but three brains.

Yes, that’s right. We have three functioning brains running our lives at any one point in time – the cephalic brain (head), the cardiac brain (heart), and the enteric brain (gut). Each organ has complex neuro-networks and neurotransmitters, is able to store and process information, and even has neuroplasticity. The cephalic brain is known to have 50 -100 billion neurons; the cardiac brain 30 -120,000 neurons, and the enteric brain 500 million neurons.

Head, Gut and Heart

The research also suggests that there are certain prime functions for each of these brains. The head is responsible for perception, thinking and making meaning of information and its highest intelligence is in creativity.

The heart is responsible for emotion, values and relational affect, and its highest intelligence is in passion.

The gut is responsible for our core identity, self-preservation (safety), and mobilisation (the need to act), and its highest intelligence is courage.

So What Does This All Mean And Why Should We Care?

In the complex and volatile social and business environments we operate in, if we do not learn how to correctly access the innate intelligence of our three brains, we are at a distinct disadvantage. So, in order to make powerful and generative decisions, we need to align these three brains and follow a special sequence. This sequence helps make decision making much easier for leaders, coaches and parents more adept to handle their employees, clients and family.

The Magic is In This

The foundational sequence developed by well-renowned pioneers in the field, Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, briefly follows as below.

One must first access their heart intelligence first, get a ‘feeling’ of the situation making compassion the forefront. From the heart, one then checks in with the head where the value-based emotional states from the heart actually influences the head-brains thoughts, logic and rational processes. From the head, the decision moves back down to the heart to feel the logical decision; then to the gut to synthesize and assimilate the decision into the leaders’ identity and mobilises them into action. Lastly, the decision moves back up to the heart, where the generative change takes place and the underlying values and human connection remains the anchor point throughout the action taken. So the sequence follows: heart to head, head to heart, heart to gut, and gut to heart.

Grant and Marvin state that “adaptive and generative leadership requires integration across all three brains to bring the greatest possible intelligence.” This type of a wisdom is transformational in the way you envision the world and interact with it. With access to these three brains, leaders are able to tap into their intuitive intelligence to know how to guide wisely and hone their people, better their decisions, and improve relationships in all aspects of their lives.

For more information on the three brains see:

Neuroscience and the Three Brains of Leadership, Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka

For more information on my services of NLP life, executive coaching and training, check out my website on www.innerhighliving.com

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