The Elephant In Your Brain

To all you career and leadership coaches who are working with job seekers or leaders trying to move up the corporate ladder, we have all heard of the proverbial elephant in the room, but let's talk about another type of elephant that takes up a lot of space but rarely gets named. Ubiquitous, invisible, it's the elephant in your client's brain. Left unchecked, it constantly produces movies in your clients' minds, and rarely are those movie rom-coms or happy endings. They're more likely dramas and horror flicks. Ah! Like, I'm never going to get a job. What if I don't get that promotion I've been counting on? Will I have to dip into my savings to make ends meet? So there are several brain-friendly coaching strategies to help shift or stop those negative predictions in your clients' brains. And here's just one. You might say to the client, Let's say you're playing the lead in a motion picture. You read the script and see that there's some suspense coming up in the next few scenes, including some uncertainty around the job. And then you find that the script is unfinished. You have to write the final scenes. How does the lead character grow, overcome, persevere, find his voice? This tip helps the brain to kick into visioning mode, which engages the prefrontal cortex, and that's the smart part of the brain. Another brain-friendly tip is to have the client actually stand up and play-act out that final scene. This is based on the work of Harvard's Amy Cuddy around the body language and power poses. You get two brain-friendly strategies in one with this technique. First, the movement distracts the client from analysis paralysis in their brain. And second, when clients start to memorize that positive feeling, they can carry it into their networking and interviewing sessions to feel much more confident.