What if current 'left brain/right brain' thinking is both sexist & wrong?: How changing just one belief can help you do better & be happier, at work & in life

Please note: there is now an omnibus edition that gives you all six books in the 'What if' series for the price of three. Click on the author name above and look for 'What if there's an easier way to do better & be happier, at work & in life'.

About this book. There’s an old saying that ‘seeing is believing’ but research into the way our brains work tells us that the truth is the exact opposite. Believing is seeing. If you want to know how important beliefs are, imagine a row of seven dominoes laid out so that, when you tip the first domino over, the rest fall without further effort required. Then label the first domino ‘believing’, the second ‘seeing’, the third ‘feeling’, the fourth ‘thinking’, the fifth ‘choosing’, the sixth ‘behaving’ and the seventh ‘results’. Now, think of a time when you tried to change your results by changing your behaviour. Chances are that, even if you succeeded, it took a huge effort of willpower because you were up against the power of your unconscious brain which was still operating under the same first-domino belief that it was using before you started trying to change. And that means it was still seeing, feeling and thinking the same way as before. More to the point, it means it’s still trying to complete the domino sequence by getting you to choose and behave in the same way as before. When we change at the level of our beliefs, on the other hand, it’s like tipping over the first domino; the rest fall naturally. And the change process feels effortless because, although our unconscious brain is working hard, the beauty of unconscious brain effort is that we’re not, well, conscious of making it. Although we are stuck with brains that work on the basis of believing-is-seeing, we have the power to swap beliefs that create negative experiences for beliefs that create positive ones.

In this book, I challenge the way we've all become conditioned to think of our right hemisphere as the home of emotions, spatial awareness and music and our left hemisphere as the home of reasoning, language and maths; a model that has morphed into the gender-stereotype that ‘men have IQ and women have EQ’ and that ‘men are left-brained and women are right-brained’. What’s interesting is that, when we try to reconcile this model with the research findings that it does not explain, we discover a model of left brain/right brain thinking that not only explains all the findings but has no gender-stereotyping or sexism in it at all. As well as being good for society to have such a brain mode, the model proposed in this book can bring us many benefits on a personal level. It can help us see the people around us as individuals rather than gender stereotypes, which improves our relationships with them; and it can help us fulfil our potential as whole-brained people; and it can help us support the people who matter to us in fulfilling their whole-brained potential; to name but three. All of which enables us to do better and be happier, at work and in life.

So, why not come with me on a short walk along the road less travelled to see how things might look if you changed just this one belief? This is a very short book which is a quick and easy read that will, at the very least, give you food for thought. And, you never know, it might just create a domino effect that helps you do better and be happier, at work and in life.