Go ahead, schedule some whine time – complain away.
Jill Bolte Taylor, the author of the amazing book My Stroke of Insight; A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, explains our left brain is our controlling, judgmental and critical brain; our open, accepting and optimistic brain is our right brain. In our performance-focused world, most of us favor our analytical left brain. We listen more to our “critic” that more readily finds fault and complains, than applauds and supports.
She shares that the right brain imposes fewer restrictions, judges less, sees things as they are, appreciates the richness of the moment, is open, creative and sensitive to nonverbal communication. This is the inner peace standard equipment we all receive – but we frequently can’t hear it over the louder, more controlling left brain.
So to manage the left brain judgmental rhetoric, she puts her “critic” on a time schedule. She allows it to whine rampantly for 30 minutes – then it is over. She even gives it a daily time slot. That is the only time any whining is allowed. And if the time slot is missed for some reason, she does not allow the whine time until the next scheduled session – the next day. What a great idea.
Each of us has things we need to complain about; it is part of our process to successfully deal with things. The problem develops when we allow too much our self- and social-talk to be negative and unhealthy – when our left brain critic takes over.
Focus on directing your self-talk into more a more supportive, caring and optimistic (right brain) dialog. Treat yourself lovingly and with kindness. Watch the caustic left brain “critic” that can sometimes keep us in line, but mostly sees us as underachieving and underperforming.
Learn from Dr. Bolte Taylor and build some whine time into your day. Impose a time limit – and when it’s over, it’s over – until tomorrow. Start with 30 minutes if you have a very loud critic. Set the timer. Soon, you will see you only need just a moment or two to vent, realign and move on. Silence your critic (left brain). Activate your admirer and dreamer (right brain). The conversation is so much better.
inner peace, internal conversation, Jill Bolte Taylor, Left Brain, Right brain, whine time
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 10:23 am and is filed under For Employees, For Individuals, For Managers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
