Brain Fact Friday on ”The Neuroscience of High Performance: Improving Focus and Clarity”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for Brain Fact Friday and EPISODE #175 that was inspired by our recent interview with Dr. Francis Lee Stevens whose book that was just released this week on Amazon, Affective Neuroscience in Psychotherapy[i] that reminded us that we can accelerate our results, experience less stress and psychopathology (like depression and anxiety) when we can understand the emotional science (affect is the scientific word for emotion) that can be mapped and understood within the depths of the human brain.   To access the images in the show notes, click here.  There were many AHA Moments during our interview with psychologist Dr. Stevens this week, but with mental health at the forefront of this podcast, and the fact that we are now into the last quarter of 2021, I wanted to provide something that we could all use to give us clarity and focus to finish this year on a strong, high note.  When I thought about what Dr. Stevens taught us, and why an application of affective neuroscience could help patients with psychological disorders, I thought about that for a while and wondered how this week’s Brain Fact Friday could bring us to a heightened sense of clarity, focus and direction that would give us a razor’s edge advantage in our life, with whatever it is we are working on or moving towards, and set us up with the right footing for a solid Q1 in 2022. In Today’s Brain Fact Friday, You Will Learn: ✔︎ Why a calm brain is important to achieve ANY level of success. ✔︎ Strategies to calm our brain/regulate ourselves before we can access the thinking/decision-making parts of our brain. ✔Why a calm, regulated brain, precedes mental clarity, needed for high performance. ✔︎ How to calm or regulate ourselves before we can access knowledge, well-being and high-performance. From Focus to Calmness Dr. Stevens taught us some great strategies that can help us to understand our emotions, and even reconsolidate past traumatic memories, but there was something I knew I was missing that comes before we can access those higher, thinking parts of the brain that we need when thinking or making decisions. Today’s topic is not just about how we can use the understanding of our brain to focus, so we can accomplish more, Friederike Fabritius dove deep into the neuroscience behind the focused brain on episode #27.[ii] She reminded us of the recipe needed for achieving peak performance as a mix of fun, and fear along with focus”[iii]  but that’s not where I wanted to go with this episode. Then I saw it and it was as clear as ice as I thought about some of our past speakers. I mentioned to Dr. Stevens that in order to apply any of the lessons he uses with his patients for accelerated results, and improved well-being, we had to get to a place of calmness, where we could step back from the busyness of our world and allow our thinking brain (or our Central Executive Network) to come back online. We have to be able to switch from our Thinking (Central Executive) Network to our Imagination (Default Mode Network) for this calmness to occur. I did talk about the importance of switching between our brain networks to allow for these flashes of creativity and insight to flow in episode #48 which is a good episode to review.[iv] For this week’s brain fact Friday, I want to add a sense of calmness behind our clarity to push us forward. I remember my mentor Bob Proctor always saying to accelerate your results you need to “Speed Up and Calm Down” and he would give us examples of how he stayed focused by saying no to what’s unimportant and direct 100% of his energy and focus to what is. If you want to accelerate your results, it begins with a calm brain, that’s focused and ready for speed.   From Calmness to Clarity Then we can take this calmness and laser focus to clarity. Clarity is one of the six habits that Brendon Burchard found that research shows pointed the needle towards high-performance vs