Neural Networks: The Internal Path to Change | Episode 3 - The Academies Coaching Resistance Series

The neural networks, that's another big piece. So it's so easy to think about somebody coming to coaching, let's say it's a leadership client, and they want to see their team being more self-initiating. And so that's the goal that they want to really empower and build and grow and develop these people, core leadership skill obviously, and yet they're not following through. So you're hearing perhaps from the client in this example that they're micromanaging or they're not delegating or they're doing things that are preventing those people that they want to self-empower and see be more self-initiating. And so you think, why are they not doing it? Well, a big piece of it is that they don't have the neural connections, the wiring that says this is the way to do this. Instead, they've got decades of practice of being, say, an individual contributor, of being the hero, of being the savior, being the one who comes in and is relied on to fix everything. And so it's like asking somebody to start speaking fluent Chinese or Russian or French when all they know is bonjour and voilà, right? So if there aren't the neural connections there and they haven't been practiced for a long time, and once they get practiced for a long time, then the myelinization process starts in the brain around all of those neural connections. And what scientists say is that the myelinization that internalization causes us to be able to very quickly get to that behavior and do it without having to think, so it becomes habit.