NOVEMBER IS THE MONTH TO PRIORITIZE MOMENTS OF REMEMBRANCE & DEEPEN YOUR COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY

By: Robert Cooper

This is a month when the hard-wired brain, by habit, aims for Thanksgiving and coasts through too many days, as it unconsciously gets lost in the busyness and noise that precede the holidays beyond.

November presents the leadership challenge of inadvertently “going missing” and failing to see or capture the many previously unseen opportunities that the month can bring. The brain’s hard-wired habit of seeking comfort, not growth, is deeply grooved and lightning-fast. The hard-wired brain innately tends to get caught up in what matters least instead of focusing on what matters most. Today’s top leaders see this and commit to work around those traps—while their competitors are coasting or falling behind.

Prioritize Moments of Remembrance
Since this is a special month for gratitude, commit to prioritizing what you remember and what you emphasize, and how you genuinely convey your gratitude to those who mean the most to you.

This will not happen in the best ways unless you choose to do it.

Start by vividly envisioning and feeling your five most important memories of significant turning points across your life. Take the time you need to really feel the significance of those occasions. Do not allow your thoughts to turn negative. Our brains are wired to think of at least two bad things for every good thing we remember. That’s one of the unfortunate ways that we are harmed by what neuroscientists call our negativity bias. Focus on the positive things that are stored more deeply in your brain.

Then jot notes as you ask yourself: For each of these five special memories—Who were the people who were there to mentor, encourage, or support you?

Every morning across the weeks ahead, soak in these feelings of gratitude—and decide how you might express appreciation to those people or their families for being there for you. It is likely that if you do this regularly, you will start remembering additional important moments, and feeling thankful for more people who have helped you with your successes.

Pausing to feel authentic gratitude, even if only for a few seconds, expands the brain’s sense of abundance—helping us move past our typical hard-wired competitive mindset, which actually hinders performance more than it helps it. Research has shown that competitive thoughts and expressions undermine the brain’s performance powers – but thinking in those ways is so common that we fail to recognize how it is actually limiting us. Thinking about others who have helped you at crucial moments in your life demonstrates how often it is true that no one has to lose for you to win.

Deepen Your Cognitive Flexibility (and Curiosity or Intellectual Humility)
Today’s top leaders and teams make the deliberate commitment to elevate above typical November coasting and do more than ever to create the best future. It can come down to enhancing your level of curiosity—often even for moments across each day, sensing and looking more openly and more deeply at life and how you tend to work and lead.

November is a month to purposefully get out of your own way, but few leaders ever see or do this. You can. While IQ tests cannot measure them, “cognitive flexibility” and “intellectual humility” are keys to learning and creativity. More than ever before, “fluid intelligence” wins the biggest of today’s opportunities—and tomorrow’s—while traditional “crystallized intelligence” (repeating and polishing the past) speeds your decline. Cognitive flexibility and intellectual humility enable you to learn from, and genuinely respect, diversity, and inclusion—one unique human being and team at a time. And it builds greater resilience and well-being as you move forward into a better future—better because you are making it so.

In the most practical sense, this reminds me of the words of the French essayist and critic Charles Du Bos:
“The important thing is this:
to be able at any moment to
sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”