Susan Britton explains how to shift your brain from fight-or-flight (red zone) to focused flow (blue zone) by boosting oxytocin through self-compassion and compassion for others. This rewires your neurocircuitry and improves coaching, creativity, and collaboration.
You know, neuroscience is such a huge topic, and one of the things that I love about the academies is that we have some very straightforward, relevant, applicable things that make it practical. One of them is our red zone, blue zone concept. So simply, the red zone is when you're in the fight-flight state, you lose a lot of your cognitive creative ability and your ability to relate to others. That's red zone. So blue zone would be when we're not in the fight-flight, we're in different physiological state where we are going to have greater flow to the prefrontal cortex. We can think better, we can create better, we can be more creative, we can be more collaborative and have more trusted relationships. Red zone, blue zone. If you think about underneath that, there are two things to be remembering. There is your neurocircuitry. That's all the wiring that you had. My wiring was I'm a small-town farm girl. How— who am I to put myself out there to be talking to big corporations about coach training? So the neurocircuitry is one piece of it. Um, then the, the neurochemistry is the other piece of it. So if we get neurocircuitry that starts saying, I am willing to experiment with a different piece of me and be uncomfortable a little bit, that's going to grow new neural neurocircuitry. But if our neurochemistry is in fight-flight or we get scared, it's going to be harder to grow that neurocircuitry. The more that you can put yourself in that place of compassion about, I'm learning new things about how to put myself out there, the more that you can experience love and compassion for other people that you're talking to and their needs and their hurts and making it about them, that compassion is going to really drive up your oxytocin. It's going to then support your brain. It's going to support trust. So I think from a brain-based perspective, remembering the red zone, blue zone, the circuitry and the chemistry, and how can I kind of put an experiment with pushing those different buttons so that they work for me and not against me.
Susan’s ICF Educator Award | The Heart Behind the Impact Katy Montgomery, PCC
