Reading and understanding iconic books like Start with Why, Find your why by Simon Sinek, Emotional Intelligence by Travis Bradberry, Talk like TED by Carmine Gallo would go a long way in helping understand the very complex human brain.
Leading, managing, networking in professional as well as personal lives
Neo cortex is the part of brain that helps us in rational thinking while limbic brain is responsible for emotions. Understanding the orientation of the human brain is a key to developing and honing emotional intelligence related skills, which is the backbone to survive and make it big in this knowledge worker age. This when done can help us act smartly in ways to get desired impact in family life as well as professional life and change our day to day life to help us achieve the desired effect.
When an instinct comes then it is an interplay between neo-cortex and emotions, emotional intelligence does the balancing act, when to use emotion and when to be rational. Responding to a stimulus where the outcome is an action, how we choose our action to produce the desired outcome can be chosen based on understanding of the working of the brain.
Being high in IQ would help us with tasks to do with neo-cortex but it is emotional intelligence that would let us put in the shoes of a receiver to tune our message and attitude in a way that would reach and impact the emotional behavior resulting out of limbic of a receiver. In a modern day for problem solving IQ matters , rational thinking and neo-cortex dominates but to gel with people in order to make them achieve desired effect emotional intelligence becomes important to guide us which part of the brain of a target to reach out to whether neo-cortex or limbic.
For accepting change, message has to reach limbic brain and influence the same. Rigidity to change is guided by limbic since even though neo cortex invokes rational thinking and asks for a corrective action, limbic comes in the way of acting constructive behavior in the way of being fearless and taking risks.
Amygdala in the limbic brain is responsible for generation of emotions and stimulating it is necessary for influencing the behavior to ensure team members of a leader give their blood, sweat and tear for the achievement of objectives. Proper balance between emotions and rational thinking is critical to act right work in teams, gel well and achieve desired results in this age.
Memorable and novel ideas/messages have the power to traverse to the limbic part of the brain and generate emotionally triggered responses way beyond the realms of rational thinking. Hence the toughest thing and a major focus in today’s world for persuasion is story-telling to trigger emotional responses by reaching the limbic brain.