Understand Your Unique Way of Learning 🧠

I feel like we do live in a society that really propagates comparison. And I love how you give this distinction between thinking, how smart am I, to how am I smart?

Yeah.

And the differing ways in which intelligence manifests itself. So I would love for you to share any words of empowerment and reflect on that, because I think it really does activate people to really own the way in which they're intelligent.

This is a great conversation. Yeah, I could. So I would imagine— so we have the largest academy of accelerated learning in the world. We have students in 195 nations. So we get a lot of feedback. And I realized after 3 decades of teaching this that it's not like I'm in my 50s. And so I'm in a kind of stage where I'm doing a lot of reflection, getting a lot of feedback. And I realized that not everything is for everybody. Like, everybody is a little bit different, right? And it's not how smart you are, it's really how are you smart? And we all have different ways of learning. And some techniques don't necessarily work for everybody the same way, just like some foods. Everyone's a little bio-individual, right? Or in relationships, not everyone's looking for the same thing. And we all— just like there's love languages, there's also a language of the brain. And it's kind of like if you are right-handed, that's your dominant hand. It doesn't mean you don't use your left hand. It's just when you're using it, you have more grace. It's more comfortable. You're more— Effective, takes less time. When you use your opposite hand, like if I asked everyone to write their name with their opposite hand, it would take longer. Maybe you feel a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe the quality wouldn't be quite as good. And sometimes when we're learning something, it's like we're trying to learn it with the opposite hand. So even if it's a subject we're interested in, I imagine some people listening, they're interested in a topic. For some reason, they're just not getting it. But maybe you're trying to learn it with the opposite hand, so it takes longer and it feels uncomfortable. and it's not— the quality is not quite as good. It's kind of like the way you prefer to learn something is different than the way the teacher is teaching it, and it's like you're 2 ships in the night and you pass each other and you don't even realize and recognize the other one's there. There's no connection, right? And so I gave a lot of thought into this, and years ago I created, uh, an assessment for your brain to see what your dominant brain type will be. And it just takes 4 minutes. It's in the book Limitless. We also have it online.

We'll link that below as well for people.

Yeah, mybrainanimal.com. And when you go through it, it just kind of like when you say, like, which Harry Potter character are you? Which Game of Thrones character? That kind of thing. It gives you understanding to know thyself better. Right. And I'll just go through it really quickly. So it's a brain code. I use a lot of acronyms as shortcuts. CODE. These are the animals. And so the C is the cheetah. Now, I pulled from personality types like Myers-Briggs, left brain, right brain dominance, visual, auditory, kinesthetic learning styles, multiple intelligence theory out of Harvard, introvert, extrovert. I pull from a lot of frameworks to create this. But once you understand your brain animal, it just makes everything easier because we give people prescriptions. Just like there's personalized medicine based on your genetic test or personalized nutrition based on a microbiome test or nutrient profile test, this is like personalized Personalized learning and training development based on form and assessment, right? So the C are your cheetahs, and their primary trait is action. So cheetahs, as the fastest animals on the planet, they thrive in fast-paced environments. They adapt very quickly. They have very strong instincts and intuition, right? The O in CODE stands for your owls, and their dominant trait is logic. They love data. They love facts and figures and formulas. Now, just even thinking about it, those 2 people would buy differently. They would learn differently. They would relate, communicate differently. The D in CODE are your dolphins. And their dominant trait is their creativity. These are people that could see— maybe they have a business. They could see— they have a vision for their business or their future. They're very passionate behind that vision also, as well. They're great at pattern recognition. And finally, The E in CODE are your elephants, and your elephant's dominant trait is empathy. And these are people who are your community builders. They bring people together. They want people to feel seen. They want people to feel heard. They use words— even you could even in their language, you could tell, like they would use less of I and my. They would use more inclusive words like, like we or us, right? So it would reflect in their communication and also You know, their criteria for learning. Because if you're going to teach someone how to read better, not only speed but understanding and focus, each of them have a different way of, because of their dominant brain traits, to learn. And so we give people kind of a formula. And you see this, like, we had our team go through this assessment, and our customer service team, 100% of them are elephants. And we didn't even sort for that because people will go to their strength. They'll find a role or responsibility where it's their element, right? And our customer service team, they're elephants because they have high empathy. They're compassionate. They want people to feel seen and heard. They want to— they build our community. You know, my business partner of 17, 18 years, she's our CEO. She's a dolphin. She has this vision. For our mission. She holds that constant and communicates it. Our CFO, our financial officer, is an owl. He loves numbers. He's always looking at the data. And so it's interesting how it shows up. It's even in pop culture. You could take any Star Trek, like Captain Kirk is like the cheetah, just goes into action. Spock would be the owl, right? Or Friends. You would have Phoebe, who's the creative musician, right? The dolphin. Or Ross is the professor scientist, so he's the owl. Joey is just acts, doesn't think about it, just acts. So he's the cheetah. Monica hosts everything and wants to be the center of her friend group, and she's the elephant. So once you understand how you— again, it's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart. And in school, they don't They, you know, like, if you even look at SATs, it's like verbal and mathematical. And it's like, it's— these are the things that are valued. Um, and but multiple intelligence theory, Howard Gardner's work out of Harvard, says there's, there's many more kinds of intelligence. Like, what about musical intelligence, kinesthetic physical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence— people are great with people— intrapersonal intelligence, you know, self-to-self, uh, visual spatial intelligence? People are great artists or graphic designers. So the idea here is that your memory or your brain performance or your IQ, it's not fixed like your shoe size. Because of things that you've talked about on your show, things like neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, we could grow older, but in a lot of ways we could grow wiser. We can make new connections through novelty, just like building a muscle. You give it, you know, physical muscles, you give it novelty, you work it out, and you give it nutrition. Same thing with your mental muscles. So neuroplasticity, the brain's amazing phenomenon to be able to adapt and make new connections. The whole idea of these neurons that fire together, they wire together, right, is stimulus. So that's why learning is so very important, exposing yourself to new ideas and insights, and then giving yourself the proper nutrition to be able to feed that mental muscle.

I love that. Thank you for sharing all that. And it's also helpful context. for me as like building a team. I mean, I know you work with so many Fortune 500 companies and implement this as well throughout that. And I'm thinking for my own team of like how Chelsea behind the scenes, she's very much so elephant with the empath and also dolphin and the creative. And I see that within myself too. And it's cool to, you know, obviously you want a CFO to be more of an owl, right?

Yeah, of course. And it's not, we're not any one thing. Obviously there's a blend. You know, again, if you're right-handed, it doesn't mean you don't use your left hand. It's just, that's your natural, And it's interesting to know what your significant other is or your teammates are because it takes the judgment out. Like, once you understand more about yourself, it takes away the self-judgment, but also the judgment we have imposed on other people. And it just explains their behavior more. And I feel like that's very powerful to build a team where people are sitting in the right seats of themselves, where they found more of their passion and more of their purpose because they're playing to their strength in that team. Natural abilities.

Yeah, it's kind of like love languages, but for learning.

Exactly. That's exactly that. It's well put.

Yeah. And that informs how we approach all those relationships too. It's like we want to love people how we want to be loved, but it doesn't work out like that.

Yeah. It's even how people communicate. If you're a cheetah, a lot of cheetahs, they'll be right to the point. They don't beat around the bush because time is of the essence. You know, owls will speak more with facts and data in a very logical sequence. Dolphins will talk about the future. And you would influence these people or market it For those of you who have a role of selling or business development, the owl will need that data, the case studies, the proof. But an elephant, that's nice, but the relationship is more important to them. The trust that you have, the bond that you have, the transparency, authenticity. For dolphin, if you could talk about their future and how your product or service fits in their future, they're going to be more understanding, receptive to it. So it really informs how you could parent, how you could hire, how you could relate. Specifically, when people take this assessment, we give them strategies, follow-up strategies for free. And there's nothing there to purchase. It's just we give them ideas on how to read better, focus better, remember better based on their brain animal.