Five conditions essential for learning and leading a growth mindset may surprise you. Using the Mita brain based approach, we draw from key research findings that tend to be ignored if we tackle new challenges with outmoded facts about human brains.
To be honest, I simply hoped to lead excellence, far more than I desired to design a mental model or create a brain based site to make quality happen. Had I located an easy-to-apply, brain friendly model that valued people of all cultures, or that led excellent results for all, I’d have gladly run with that approach. Yes, even gladly forfeited my entire life’s work to design Mita’s brain-powered leader approach described below. Now that it’s won top awards, and has PhD level research in several countries completed to prove it gets observable and improved results, I’m glad I gave a lifetime to it. It’s especially rewarding to see others use it without a lifetime background of international travel, collaboration, and research studies though. Let’s go for daily growth together!
Had I located more managers along the way who invited wonder, delighted in new discoveries and supported people to live the scientific method for the sake of new discoveries, I’d have leapt for joy to lead with it. Instead, managers I met seemed settled in a maze of myths about entitlement wrapped in leadership roles.
Had I found curious managers, for instance, who engaged and investigated new ideas, rather than talk as insular experts at meetings, Mita’s brainpowered approach wouldn’t have been necessary. To think I’d have saved 30 years of global travel to consult leaders in many countries and learn from diverse cultures.
Rather than promote broken traditions or foster rigid routines, I spent a lifetime riding an advanced magic carpet over amazing wonders and woes of change around pillars of excellence wherever they held people as capital and excellence that benefits all.
If mentoring had resembled reciprocal coaching more, I’d have embraced it. I’d not have bothered designing Mita’s mindguide approach which helps us to teach and learn as we lead. Or if conventional managers had modeled the fact that IQs are more fluid than fixed, I’d have grown new capabilities with them in response. Just that one lived reality would have helped to find more of the leadership excellence I craved. Where was the manager who reached for the wider good or cultivated values and ethics at the helm?
I tossed around questions, such as: Could leadership shape mental and emotion health for people – promote more laughter and prevent unfair performance reviews? I’d have helped its contribution to ratchet up workplace well being. Instead I added another critical component to Mita’s approach as a way to ensure access into the brain’s heightened capabilities through laughter.
Increasingly, people lament failed leadership, as they observe political leaders unprepared to engage civility or without skills to learn from opposing views. Wasted possibilities of talents that could be managed yet seemed ignored, compelled me to harness multiple intelligences into brainpowered tools for a finer future.
Had managers helped workers rewire more for peace that cultivates freedom, liberates humanity, and leaves folks primed for shared solutions – rather than settle for violence or war, I’d have jumped on board. Instead, holy cows of critical thinking, promoted cynicism and truncated innovation by default, so I ran to brainpowered tools. Determined that Mita approaches could lead adventure on the other side of cynicism, I regained hope alongside managers I admired.
Check out the ratio between what people and organizations might have been, and what they’ve become, and you’ll likely agree that rejuvenated leader approaches are urgently needed. It was that reality check, that launched Mita brainpowered tools with so much positive global response. It’s also why the Mita International Brain Center continues to align workplace progress with dynamic neuro discoveries.
After years of working across many countries and cultures where tone-related-gridlocks too often limit managers, Mita’s five pillar approach, both cultivates and sustains tone just as it fosters innovative initiatives as norm. How so?
Brainpowered tone stokes innovation as people:
(1) Questionpossibilities with the kind of tone that engages opposing views, while at the same time building goodwill among those who disagree.
(2) Target improvements and collaborate solution possibilities from diverse angles.
(3) Expect quality inventions by facilitating differences and engaging shared possibilities.
(4) Movemultiple intelligences perspectives into well-shaped conduits that blend, use and value people’s unique strengths and different perspectives.
(5) Reflect on sustainable growth possibilities – in brainpowered celebrations– hosted across your entire organization to cross pollinate ideas and track initiatives.
Each pillar finds roots in seventeen learning and leading theories, is impacted by relevant neuro discoveries, and applies to diverse cultural practices in several countries where it was implemented and designed. Constructed to counter workplace toxins (see green boxes in figure 1), the model offers entry points for rewiring the brain in ways that promote innovative growth across differences.
Mita™ Leadership Growth Chart – 5 Pillars (figure 1)
| QUESTION Pillar 1 | + TARGET Pillar 2 | + EXPECT Pillar 3 | + MOVE Pillar 4 | + REFLECT Pillar 5 | = GROWTH Pillars 1-5 |
| + TARGET | + EXPECT | + MOVE | + REFLECT | = PASSIVITY | |
| QUESTION | + EXPECT | + MOVE | + REFLECT | = CONFUSION | |
| QUESTION | + TARGET | + MOVE | + REFLECT | = SLOPPINESS | |
| QUESTION | + TARGET | + EXPECT | + REFLECT | = WASTE | |
| QUESTION | + TARGET | + EXPECT | + MOVE | = STAGNATION |
Growth in the chart above, is (illustrated in top boxes of figure 1) results from implementing all five brainpowered pillars, while any one omitted (as illustrated in empty boxes) results in commonly encountered barriers to corporate innovation (represented in far right boxes.)
It’s time for an innovation model to support managers as cultivators of advanced potential in any organization. Have you seen it in action?
Imagine your workplace alive with innovative on-the-job problem solving tactics. Feature motivated people who wield clever devices that impact the department’s bottom line by opening new spigots to brainpower. Ahh now you’ve looked straight through Mita’s leadership lens. In reality, it’s more dynamic than its manifesto and packed with more neuro related punches that excellent leaders tout.
On Mita’s most basic level, brainpowered tools simply equip managers to help drive winning productivity. Leaders like you drive its engines. How so? Three problem areas urgently need to change before prosperity can surface.
In leadership courses at graduate levels Mita leaders facilitate, excellence as it shapes three areas: 1. Tone that builds goodwill, and reduces toxins among those who disagree; 2. Talent that converts hidden and unused cognitive capabilities into cutting edge workplace solutions across formerly isolated silos, and; 3. Training (or mindguiding) that drives innovation for ongoing novel ventures. A closer look shows the pitfalls and the possibilities for all three.
How would Mita’s brainpowered tools equip you to lead goodwill, unleash talent, and mutually engage others for a finer future where innovation is the norm?
What do you do to ensure you sleep well enough to put you in a good mood at work the next day?
Sleep comes from slower waves:
Sleep requires slower brainwaves than peak performances compels. It’s the flip side of your mind energized by fast moving brain waves – called beta waves. Start to daydream during a lecture, or a boring meeting, for instance, and your brain waves shift down a gear to alpha brain waves.
You’re likely still awake when speakers drone on, yet your waves would register lower on an EEG, which is a reading that measures brain waves by hooking electrodes to several points on your head. How so?
Move down one level lower to theta waves and your body relaxes, heart rate and respiration lower slightly, and your mind tends to move back and forth between creative energy and deep relaxation. Eventually, the lowest brain waves, called delta, kick in, and for awhile the brain moves back and forth between delta and theta movement.
In the first stage of sleep, EEGs show the brain waves slowing down progressively through a thirty minute period. Your brain at that point shifts into REM or rapid eye movement sleep.
Nathaniel Kleitman, discovered in the 1950s, that is REM sleep a person’s eyes flutter rapidly in all directions. In REM stages of sleep people dream, and when woken in that stage you may feel like a Mack truck hit you – but you will likely remember your dreams. Interestingly brain waves at the deepest sleep speed up again – even though the brain remains dormant to conscious thought.
The key is to sustain brain waves suitable for the moment, based on what you hope to accomplish. Easier said than done for a person prone to stress. For example, alpha waves are generated by the relaxed brain, so that you have vivid memories, aha moments, and you feel at peace with the world.
Chemical and electrical activity alters sleep waves:
Serotonin chemicals are released which is characterized by high performance and researchers tell us that when some people begin to move from alpha waves into theta movement, sleep soon follows.
In contrast, the stress hormone cortisol is released in dangerous doses in people who sustain stress in the lives. This can be caused by poor diet, lack of priorities, too little sleep, habits such as meta messages which generate poor relationships, and lack of reflection that helps you grow and progress in daily doses.
Whether sleep is poor through stress, or quiet and relaxed in calm, you’ll enjoy three terrific books, to sustain brainwaves for sleep at night and higher performance in day.
Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset
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