Hacking your brain for better relationships

#brainhacking #neuroscience #brain #brainscience #leadership #personaldevelopment

© 2024 Zoryna O’Donnell

This article was first published by The Maverick Paradox Magazine on 30/07/2024

Whether you consider yourself to be a social butterfly thriving on interaction with other people or a misanthrope with a deep rooted distrust and dislike of human beings and their society, you have a social brain.

That’s right, your brain evolved, and grew to be as big as it is now, to help you understand others, make complex social decisions and to deal with the intricate social structures you live in.

In fact, connecting with others, forming relationships with them, inclusion and belonging were so important for human survival that our brains evolved to have a neurocognitive overlap between physical and social pain. In other words, it really hurts to be left out – whether it is in the workplace or in one’s private life.  

In his book The Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Source of Leadership, Wilfred Drath argued that, nowadays, relationships, rather than authority, superiority, or dominance are key to a new model of leadership – the relational leadership.

Building trusting and authentic relationships with their employees helps leaders to increase their own overall effectiveness and that of their teams and to use human connections and human capital as an invisible glue that bonds teams and whole organisations together.

But building and maintaining healthy and long-lasting relationships does not come naturally to everyone despite all the ‘social wiring’ we have in our heads.  Here are a few hacks which you can use to build better relationships as a leader – both in the workplace and beyond. …

Please read the entire article here. [ https://themaverickparadox.com/hacking-your-brain-for-better-relationships/  ]

Image credit: johnhain via Pixabay.