Susan Britton MCCICF Award-Winning Coach Educator, Neuroscience-Informed ICF/SHRM Coach Training, INSEAD Executive Masters in Change, Advocate for Evolutionary Shift from “Red Zone” to “Blue Zone” for Leaders, Coaches & Fellow Humans

Neuro Coaching Tip: Neuro Myelination

Name: Neuro Coaching Tip: Neuro Myelination
Uploaded: 2025-01-31T06:00:03+00:00
Duration: 1 min 26 s
Channel: Susan Britton MCC
Description: In this brief coaching tip, Susan explains the neuroscience of myelination and its impact on habit formation. She describes myelin sheaths as…

31 Jan 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:26

In this brief coaching tip, Susan explains the neuroscience of myelination and its impact on habit formation. She describes myelin sheaths as protein‑fatty insulation around nerve fibers that enable electrical impulses to travel up to 300 times faster, making practiced behaviors feel effortless. Using the example of brushing teeth with the dominant versus non‑dominant hand, she illustrates how familiar actions are executed quickly due to high myelinization. Susan then translates this biology into a coaching strategy: help clients pair a new behavior with an already‑well‑myelinated, familiar behavior to lower cognitive load, reduce resistance, and accelerate learning. Repeated practice will eventually myelinate the new behavior, making it automatic. The tip ends with an encouraging “Happy coaching!”

Chapters

Susan with a walking tip. This is a neuroscience walking tip to aid in your coaching knowledge. So we all know that behaviors happen easily for us when we've practiced them, when they're really familiar to us, and there's a biological reasoning for that. It's called myelin. Some of you may have heard of myelin sheaths around nerve fibers. So myelin sheaths are like this insulation. They're composed of proteins and fatty substances, and then it allows electrical impulses to travel faster. Simple example: if you brush your teeth with your right hand, easy to do that. If you try to brush your teeth with your left hand and you're not familiar with doing that, it's gonna take a lot longer to do that. In fact, myelinated nerve fibers actually travel 300, 300 times faster. And so how that relates to coaching is to think about if you've got a client who's trying to learn a new behavior of some sort, if you can help them think about pairing up the new behavior with something that's already familiar, something that's already easy for them, there's a chance then that they're gonna have a lot easier time and less resistance resistance and less cognitive load and less energy associated with learning and trying out that new behavior. Again, if it's paired up with something, a behavior that's already got high myelinization associated with it. And then eventually, once you keep practicing that behavior, that too will have the myelinization associated with it and it will become easy. Happy coaching!