027 Margaret Moore: Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

12/01/12 • 45 min

Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Margaret Moore, MBA (“Coach Meg”), an executive wellness coach and co-author of Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time.

Coach Meg is the co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital (a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School) and the founder and CEO of Wellcoaches Corporation, a leading coach training school.

We asked Coach Meg to discuss how we can apply some of the latest research in neuroscience in our everyday lives to be more resilient and on top of things.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

From the show

Exercise is the break through medicine...In the last decade there has been more research on exercise than what we have done in human history. When you combine that with the explosion around how the brain works, we have a lot more tools.

Moving the body is vital for the brain’s ability to learn, adapt, to regulate emotion and, of course, the slowing of aging...so moving the body is what calms the heart rate, it calms the frenzy so just about every day you read about its power in improving how the brain functions and improving our health.

The higher your cardiovascular fitness the lower your heart rate, the more the activation of the recovery branch of our nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system, which leads to a calmer heart. That directly calms the brain and it improve the attention. It improves the ability to deal with impulses and distractions. It improves the ability to be creative. So the more fit you are generally, the more benefits you will get to the brain and in the moment.

We can now lay out the conditions, the optimal conditions, for the brain to learn to change and to be resilient. Some of those are in the Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life book and I am starting work on the next book so it is a combination of a number of things that all work together and it turns out when you look at today’s way of life we are living in a way that works against the fundamental design of the brain.

The real deal is using your brain’s power which means reserving its peak performance for the most important things and giving them your undivided attention.

...where we put our full attention, neuroscientists call that the learning process, when you are really focused and motivated and, you know, you’ve got lots of juice and you are really in full flight, that is where your brain is laying down new connections. So neurons are making connections with other neurons which have never existed before. Over time, as you connect more and more neurons you build a new network so whether mastering a new project or mastering a new skill or overcoming a challenge, whatever it happens to be wherever you are giving something your undivided attention that is where your brain is learning. So you want to treat those times during the day...those brain learning times...as precious moments for learning and you want to make sure you are using them for the most important topics in life where you really do need to learn and improve.

If you know Csikszentmihalyi’s work, the more of those moments you have in a day, the more flow experience that you have the higher your well-being and the better your health too. So these flow episodes in our day are the peak moments of life where we are completely engaged in something even better that you are good at and have a higher purpose and you feel like a million bucks after those periods in a day.

It is a good thing to note that overwhelmed is a potent part of stress and negative emotions. Negative emotions dim the light in your pre-frontal cortex so they actually impair your ability to feel better and to get on top of it. So how you relate to overwhelmed is actually not a bad place to start...

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.