Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

How the Different Parts of the Brain Help Vision and Goal-Setting

I’m starting to explore a lot more of the neuroscience behind why vision and goal setting are such powerful tools.

Initial observations are fairly simplistic, but serve as a good build on previous posts (see tags to the right)

As a simple foundation it is helpful to see the left hemisphere of our brain as being the logical, detailed manager of time. It wants to know why, what, how and when. In a lot of detail.

The right hemisphere exists in the sensory moment. It revels in the here and now. It is intuitive, creative, has no sense of time and only relishes the details that improve the sensory experience.

Jill Taylor in My Stroke of Insight explains, ‘By its design our right mind is spontaneous, carefree and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow free without inhibition or judgement’

Immediately an observation is that we are given the capacity; in fact we’re given half of whatever we define as ourselves or ‘self’ to fulfil our creative capacity. And yet how many of us would hand on heart be able to say that we spend much of our adult lives being spontaneous, carefree and creative?

So point one: we are given the capacity to imagine and create. For what purpose? One, arguably, is to imagine our goals and what we want to strive to achieve.

Associated to the above is the fact that ‘the present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one’

So, in imagining and planning for the future using the right hemisphere, does half of your brain starts to merge your imagined future with the realities of now?

The left hemisphere, in thriving in the detail and pulling together all of your experienced moments into a ‘past, present and future’, uses language to ‘break the big picture perception of the present moment into manageable and comparable bits of data they can talk about’

So, the other half of your brain can then kick in if the time is taken to describe your imagined future using all five of your senses. Your left hemisphere understands this way of describing the future. You can set the programme.

Add time, targets and milestones into the process of imagining the future then to all intents and purposes the next step towards your vision and goals just becomes an action.

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