Your brain is protecting you…and blocking your progress

Our brains are wired to keep us alive. From the many years of neurological research we are now lucky to have available, we know the amygdala’s key role is to protect and prepare us for emergency events. Unfortunately for us, it hasn’t evolved from the paleolithic times and cannot decipher between a sabre tooth tiger attacking us and the project deadline for next week.

You may have come across a post on Instagram which is a jar of folded up post-it notes. The gist of the caption is that once a week you write something great on a note, pop it in the jar, and then at the end of the year you read all the awesome things that have happened.

For my training, I have a specific warm-up routine I go through religiously every single day. It has become second nature to me, to the point where if I don’t do it, I don’t feel right and don’t perform as well as I know I can. It’s actually the same for when I get ready for work each day.

At NEP we pride ourselves on individualising performance. There are no two humans exactly alike. We have so many different factors that make up our perspective it’s a wonder we can even sit in the same room as other people and find common ground, let alone come to unified decisions together.

Thanks to a further understanding of neuroscience, “choose your thoughts” is generally pretty good advice. It works on the basis that our thoughts become wiring in our brains so we want to make sure that our thoughts are aligned with the wiring we want to create.

So many people believe that you can’t really build resilience until you have experienced a major setback. The good news is that isn’t true. No two brains are created the same, which means that some people are naturally going to be more optimistic and resilient than others. And thanks to neuroscience we know that brains are able to be re-wired so that resilience can be built even if it doesn’t come naturally to you.

I recently read a post from a fellow athlete I follow on social media about the hard work and effort he puts into his training and athletic career. He also, quite rightly, pointed out it was all totally his choice – he chooses to give up other things in his life in order to follow […]

I’ll let you in on a secret about other people’s actions…..the majority of the time (and I’m talking 99.9% of the time), other people’s actions and language have absolutely nothing to do with us personally and everything to do with what’s going on inside them right now. Yet, most of the time we take their […]

At NEP we coach some really awesome people – yes best job in the world…. but I digress… and the nature of the beast is that the issue of perfectionism often rears its ugly head. And yes it can be ugly… Let’s think about perfectionism as the need for things to be perfect regardless of […]