Brain Resultsology! How Your Brain Operates Performance Wise! Scientific Secrets to Rise to Your Personal Mental and Physical Peak Performance Levels!

Your Brain and Performance

It is a big shame and very bad that in school we never learn much about what is the most important subject and that is understanding the basics of how we function as human beings. It is, in my view a scandal and a conspiracy. Then in life we are “schooled” to focus on a few organs such as the heart, legs, arms and the rest of the body and never the brain. The result as humans, we invest so heavily in our rest of the body by clothing it, clean it and rest it but we pay very little, if any, attention to the brain; which brain is the command centre of the whole body and the link with the mind and the spirit. The brain handles the thinking and a large part of the emotions (the heart and the gut handle part of the emotions!) and a certain set of emotions link the human with the mind and the spiritual realm. Brain management is key even for people in organisations because whatever else we talk about such as talent, emotional intelligence, general intelligence, performance, decision-making, learning, energy, creativity, values, strategy, knowledge, information, expertise, experience-hey everything is all at the command and direction of the brain, your brain and my brain and their brains. This does not seem so obvious even to many CEOs, Board Leaders, Top Executives, Board Members, Top Officials, Managers and Career People. This lack undermines the ability of humans to get their best possible results and to reach their highest levels of personal, organisational, team, business and economic performance.?

Your Brain and Your Performance?

The subject of performance is one of the area still handled rather badly in most organisations. First, many, if not most organisations, use a bad or poor definition of performance. Second, the most common performance management models used by most organisations are flawed, poor and therefore either completely ineffective or, at best, produce meagre results. The root cause of this problem is a combination of bad job designs, bad recruitment models. This is why the majority of companies, organisations perform below their potential. I just wanted to flag this out but it would require its own full text to explain the problem and how to solve it.?

Now when it comes to the performance of individuals, the human brain is the performance machine. Many people have no idea of what exactly happens inside their brains during the process of performing tasks and carrying out missions and assignments and, therefore, performance is something that happens to them somehow and to them, bad performance and high performance are a matter of chance or luck. This is not true. There is a science involved in human performance and most of this science is brain-level science for both mental performance and physical performance.?

The Brain-Level Performance Dynamics

Your performance, at brain level, involves many elements that include;

1. Situation assessment systems?

2. Decision-making systems guiding the brain (Remember the brain, especially unmanaged and untrained, makes more than 80% of the decisions on its own without our conscious awareness and involvement. The majority of these decisions either do not make rational sense, or are bad or dangerous or poor. The human brain is not that good in making decisions. This is a fact and the reason why we must learn to manage it.)

3. Performance goals or objectives (the goals can be conscious or unconscious)

4. Reasons for acting in a certain way in certain situations or with certain people

5. Performance inputs (the brain compiles the inputs automatically unless it is learning a new task through active learning)

6. Performance processes (The brain triggers and manages these processes mostly automatically unconsciously unless we are in the conscious, active learning phase)

7. Performance outputs-(We call these results and they can be desired, desirable or undesirable. The brain can produce very bad or dangerous results in a very spectacular way!

8. Real-time performance management (The brain has its own internal feedback and feedforward systems and circuits for managing real time performance when we are doing something.)

Mental States and Your Real-Time Performance?

There are two main ways of viewing performance. The first way is the strategic perspective where you talk about your best possible performance at something. This best possible performance is what we call your “natural ability” which is predominantly a matter of your genetic potential. By genetic potential I mean your talent based potential based on how your brain is wired and configured at birth and during the first five or years of conception and birth as well as your early child experiences. You can also call this performance your baseline performance.?

Now, you can elevate your maximum possible performance through conscious action on your talent or baseline performance in a variety of ways that can generally call STRATEGY. You may never have thought about it this way but learning and training were originally conceived by humans as a part of the STRATEGY to improve performance. I say originally because now learning and training in many organisations and institutions have become kind of optional, baseless, purposeless, box-ticking routines.??

Many people who lead and manage organisations have lost this strategic sense of learning and training; the reason why many organisations never bother investing seriously in training, education and development. People are not being trained, developed and educated for performance and results. It is strange that this same “leaders” and “managers” expect high performance from non-trained, poorly educated and poorly developed individuals and teams. This is not good leadership at all. Training, education and development raise your baseline performance and make you perform at higher levels than you would by just using your genes-based, natural performance. In other words;

Your best possible level of performance=genetic potential X strategy

Now, when you actually do something, even when you are highly talented and well trained and developed in it; your real time performance depends on what we call your mental states and your environment of operation. There are two sub-states that make your mental states;

1. Your emotional state and?

2. Your cognitive states

Your cognitive and emotional states work hand in hand and they control

1. Your focus while you are undertaking a task or set of tasks

2. Your concentration on what you are doing. (Can you perform well in an examination when your brain is jumping in and out of your questions at hand and is spending a lot of time wondering into what you want to do after you finish school?)

3. Your memory (memory is key in real-time performance. What happens if you forget your next step when you are doing something important? Your brain needs enough memory to process things including bringing the mental resources you need such as knowledge, information and skill-bites from storage centres to the executive centres where action happens! )

4. Your energy utilisation-Negative emotional states consume energy and divert it away from what you are supposed to be doing. Can you perform well in an examination when your brain is drowning in neurochemicals of fear??

Let me summarise;

1. Your maximum level of performance is a product of genetic potential and strategy for maximising on that genetic potential. Training, education, person development, brain management, and self-equipment with mental and physical tools are all elements of the strategy for maximising on that genetic potential. Strategy raises your level of maximum performance from your baseline performance determined by your genetic potential.

2. Your maximum level of performance is not always available in real time. Your mental states can undermine the full availability of your maximum level of performance, causing you to perform below your maximum at some times. This is why managing your mental states is a key strategy used consciously or unconsciously by many high achievers and high performers who are able to almost consistently able to perform at their peak performance levels.

3. By improving your brain management you take greater control of your mental and physical performance and the performance results that you get.

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I speak of these things about the brain and how it works on the basis of the following;

1. I trained in neurolinguistic programming (nlp) and I am a certified practitioner. Nurolinguistic is a the science of high achievement and how the brain operates in the areas of performance, results and the hows and whys our feelings, emotions, thoughts, emoting and thinking.?

2. I studied human biology and part of my degree studies in biological sciences to university level.?

3. I have studied many major works in the areas of emotions, emotional intelligence, thinking, neuropsychology and psychology. This includes all the major works of prominent experts in the various disciplines around brain performance, thinking, emotions such as Daniel Goleman and his associates, Edward De Bono, Nikolai Tesla, Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Milton Hyland Erickson, Igor Ledochowski, Richard E. Boyatzis and others.

4. I have studied many high achievers and peak performers including their biographies to get some insights in what they do, what they think and how they think in their areas of brilliance.

5. I have my personal experience in high achievement and high mental performance in my academic studies having been the best student many times and getting top grade results and academic awards including bursaries. I also have personal experience in physical performance from my extreme sports in running ultramarathons including the famed?Cape Town 56 Kilometres Two Oceans Marathons and the notorious Durban-Pietermaritzburg 87 kilometres to 90 kilometres Comrades Marathon. I have competed both marathons twice each.?

?Simon Bere, 2023