Safe Head Space

I am a great believer in giving people space and allowing them time to find their own way and their own solutions.

Challenges/Barriers/Solutions

There is something about human nature & barriers. Don’t ask me what it is (but I am sure on some level we are designed to constantly overcome tough environments) but I do know that coaching allows people healthy time & space to join the dots in their thinking and to create the right solutions for themselves.

Daily in small matters and regularly in life-sized chunks we somehow need to connect up all the compartmentalised aspects of who we are and what we value.

Life Coaching Tools

In that vein, I’ve been working with tools through Life Coaching which although I know they work and I believe in them, there is now increasing clinical evidence as to how they work inside our brains.

BBC Horizon: The Creative Brain

Today, I watched the BBC Horizon programme The Creative Brain.

The keys things I came away with were:

• We know the brain holds different bits of information in different parts of the brain
• We know that there are logical and creative ways of thinking through problems. Left side/right side processing
• Various stimuli allow us to fire connections between those different parts of the brain. Those stimulating the right-hand side of the brain connect more disparate bits of information. Thats when we experience what feels like a Eureka! moment
• The brain allows itself a moment to shut down certain stimuli just prior to processing that ah-ha moment. Not unlike shutting our eye as we evaluate a thought or what someone has just said
• Applying different approaches or routines to an activity or problem can deliver creative outcomes. This is like removing traditional or existing barriers. You then see it differently. Perspective. Reframing
• Taking breaks away from your issue and doing some mundane activities creates an environment where insight & creative thought patterns are ‘suddenly’ born. Think of when you have that light-bulb moment while cleaning or washing the dishes?! Interestingly, doing nothing didn’t aid creativity and doing something too taxing was draining on processing and likely focussed on the taxing problem. This may explain why I like what appears to be tedious activities such as swimming or gyming. I’m actually allowing myself to process creatively 🙂

The tools of Life Coaching are great and now that science is proving some hard clinical evidence of what’s going on while we process decision making and creative solution finding, I couldn’t be happier.

If you want to listen to my summary of the programme, I also created a 3 minute piece on Audioboo. Happy listening!