Stephen H Baum Leadership

What holds you back from doing something that worries you? What makes you do something you know is not in your own interest? Why does this get even more true of elderly people?

For years, I have been studying: 

1. Shaping experiences — the events that shape our deepest abilities to take charge of our lives, to deal with risk, to make decisions and to engage others in our agenda 

2. Emotional intelligence — the behaviors we exhibit under stress and the underlying assumptions and beliefs that drive the behavior, often since childhood

3. Brain research about our “old brain” — the hard wiring that hijacks our reaction to events, sales pitches and more.

Now it is clear that they all  come together. What happens to us in childhood, early education and early work life set our deepest abilities. Interviews with two dozen CEOs for my book showed there is an archetypal set of ten of these that shape leadership abilities. Goleman and Bar On and others have shown through their assessments that “EQ” is as important as IQ in success and that it is driven by “mind-maps”  of assumptions and beliefs that drive our interpretation of and reaction to events. And experts in neuro-marketing like Christophe Morin have shown how messages  can be blocked or accepted depending on what the target sees and hears first because of the EQ of the old brain. The new brain (thinking) or the emotional brain may never process the messages. 

Now add a fourth element: “Brain plasticity,” according to experts seen on PBS (public television), is the determinant of “brain span” — like life span, how long your brain works the way it needs to for a quality life. There is a chemical factory inside of us and a lot of wiring and tissue that determine brain plasticity.  And while brain plasticity decreases in old age, there are ways to prolong it. 

So what?  That will be the subject of future posts on leadership behavior, leadership misbehavior and how you can draw on all of these concepts to take yourself up a notch as a leader and as a person.