"The terms left-brained and right-brained came into popular parlance through the Nobel prize-winning research of Professor Roger Sperry. Sperry discovered that in most cases, the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex processes logical, analytical thinking while the right hemisphere processes imaginative, big-picture thinking."
"Effectiveness demands the creation of balanced brain teams...More often than not, however, individuals tend to polarize by hemispheric style. The left-brain dominants in the finance department gather by their coffee machine, look over at the right-brained marketing people, and think, 'Those flaky dreamers have their heads in the clouds. They don't understand the bottom line like we do.' Meanwhile, at the right-brained watercooler, the right-brainers are eyeing the left-brainers and thinking, 'What tiny minds those bean counters have. They don't see the whole picture like we do."
I see this in a very similar way to the whole introvert/extrovert conversation. I know introverts who hide away and use their introversion as an excuse and I know extroverts who never stop and use their extroversion as an excuse. At the end of the day, they're both an excuse to not grow.
I'm a confirmed introvert who has learned how to extrovert when I need to. I understand that if I have to extrovert a lot, it's going to take a lot of energy and I need to make plans to go after those things that help build up my inner reserves.
I'm also a very creative and intuitive person. I used to intuit something around me and I took those conclusions at face value but I had a highly left-brained friend who would quiz me on my intuitive conclusions. In those conversations, I realized that there really was a logical reason behind what I intuited but it meant I had to take a step back and look at it logically before I could explain to him why I felt a certain way about a person or situation.
That was a revelation to me that the logical steps I learned in high-school geometry class (the only thing I learned in high school geometry class) could help unlock my creative process and intuitions for me and for those I was attempting to communicate with. Now, not only did I have my intuitions and creative flights of fancy but I had a reason for them and most of the time I could explain them. If I couldn't immediately explain them, I let it simmer until I could work my way through it. That gave me more power than ever for my creativity and validated my conclusions.
There was also a surprising side-effect. It gave me a powerful tool to understand my emotions and gain control over them. I no longer had to feel sad but not understand why I was sad. I could be angry and find the root of the anger. I could embrace my emotions, acknowledge the emotions and then find a way to make constructive use of them. Before this, my emotions were so strong and they would so easily overwhelm me. I would make decisions based on how I felt.
In the Matchbox Twenty song, "All I Need," the songwriters writes something pretty profound for our day - "Everybody's trusting in their heart like the heart don't lie." Emotions are real (left-brainers) but they're not always reality (right-brainers).
Right-brained people need left-brainers to keep them honest with themselves and the world around them (to a certain degree). Left-brained people need right-brainers to help them fly once in a while, take a little flight of fancy from time to time. Those balancers don't have to be romantic partners. They could be family, friends, colleagues. Sometimes the balancer can be you.
Learn to ask the logical questions and let your creativity stand up to the test and learn to walk among the stars a little bit. Let your balancers teach you how to use your whole brain and find a whole new world of wonderful.
(Based on the Michael J Gelb book, "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.")
No comments:
Post a Comment