By Kristen Hansen

I have just returned to Sydney highly stimulated by a whirlwind trip to Boston for the NeuroLeadership Summit 2010. Why was I so excited by this event? Many people have asked me about it, personally or via my online networks. Well, the conference confirmed the dramatic and rapid evolution of understanding about the brain due to technology such as PET scans and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). There is more and more evidence creating the “science” of leadership for the first time in history.

My own current postgraduate studies in the neuroscience of leadership are part of the world’s first Masters of Science in NeuroLeadership degree at Middlesex University. While learning core lessons that underpin my work as a coach, trainer and facilitator, I am also making deeply personal discoveries. We live our entire lives without really understanding our brains but here finally are some answers. They are also concrete tools for leaders to generate personal and team peak performance.

The NeuroLeadership Summit is a global initiative bringing together neuroscientists and leadership experts to build a new science of leadership development. This gives leaders a greater understanding of how to 1) solve problems, 2) regulate emotions, 3) collaborate, and 4) facilitate change.

Despite 60,000 books on leadership there is no real agreement on what makes a leader successful. A 2008 study showed that improving leadership was the second most urgent human capital imperative for most companies’ business strategies. (Rock, 2010)

Here are some of the many highlights from the Boston conference:

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Neural Challenges for Senior Leaders: Moderate Stress, Good Sleep, Positive Affect

Jessica Payne, from the University of Arizona, presented brain research on the challenges for the senior leader, identifying three key factors that lead to optimal brain performance. They are: 1) moderate stress 2) good sleep, and 3) positive affect. Target and improve any one of these and it benefits all three. Conversely, not achieving any one of them impacts all three. When overstressed, we do not sleep well, which impacts our mood (reduces positive affect), which in turn makes our focus problem-centred rather than solution-centred, creating more stress – and so the downward spiral continues.

Why the requirement for “moderate stress”? Peak performance certainly requires some level of stress. With too little stress leaders can be easily distracted and even bored. Without a certain amount of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, we underperform. But beyond optimal or peak arousal, performance levels fall. This is not dissimilar to the Flow principle (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).Too much dopamine creates stress at harmful levels and increases negative emotional memories. Cumulatively this explains why stress can lead to depression.  Ongoing stress impacts health. As stress increases, the hippocampus, the area in the brain responsible for memory, undergoes a very clear size reduction. In summary, stress reduces our memory.

Fortunately neuroscience has identified proven ways to substantially reduce the impact of stressful stimuli. Other speakers described these approaches.

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i) Emotion Regulation

Kevin Oshner PhD, a founding father of the social neuroscience field and head of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Columbia University, described emotion regulation and strategies for dealing with stress. Among these, reappraisal is proving to have considerable impact: one methodology is that described in Peter Gollwitzer’s Implementation Intentions (1993), a popular and brain-friendly way to regulate emotions. This involves identifying the contexts where stress occurs and the stimuli that trigger it, then generating a statement in the form “If… then….” – a cognitive link between the context and stimuli that can provide a mental trigger or anchor which re-engages the pre-frontal cortex (our executive thinking) and moves us out of a limbic (emotion-based) reaction..

ii) Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress dramatically and increase an individual’s ability at meta-cognition, or awareness of their own thinking. Of course, Buddhism has been espousing the benefits of mindfulness for thousands of years. Finally science has caught up and seen the dramatic improvements in brain function and emotion regulation abilities of trained meditators..

Mindfulness expert Ellen Langer Ph.D, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, lectures all over the world and is author of over 200 publications and 11 books. A movie is currently being made about her life, starring Jennifer Anniston: Hollywood latches onto neuroleadership!  Langer described mindfulness as an active state of mind characterised by being in the present, noticing subtle differences, being sensitive to context and perspective. By paying attention to small changes in everything, we are mindful.

Children can tell when we are not mindful: they will demand attention until they have undivided, mindful attention. Mindless attention is worth very little and yet this is how, in a multi-tasking world, with ever-increasing demands, most of us walk around – lost in our thoughts of yesterday, tomorrow’s meeting or the next conversation, planning and ruminating and ‘multi-tasking’. It may feel functional and even efficient, but it is not. It dramatically affects memory, but worse, it stifles creative insights. With a noisy brain, we miss the significant connections. Insightful people have a quietened brain, have trained themselves to be present to stop the constant noise, and have much greater ability to tap into their unconscious processing. It is the ability to make distant links and create innovative solutions that sets the senior leader apart – even if it is more and more challenging to achieve with competition for attention from stakeholders, employees, information and technology. 

Quality Sleep and Memory

Jessica Payne’s second key area that can affect the senior leader’s brain capabilities is quality sleep. Getting enough of the right kind of sleep can have a big impact on memory. Interestingly, the old saying “Sleep on it” if things get heated between people is now proven by neuroscience to be the right medicine. After sleep, we retain the memory of an upsetting emotion but the negative impact is reduced. An area that is reduced during sleep, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is responsible for cognitive control, rationality and decision-making. This explains why in dreams we can make such absurd connections and bring together quite distant relationships. It is also why we often wake up with completely new perspectives to problems: insights are generated when distant relationships are formed within the brain.

As we age, our memory is challenged and lack of quality sleep helps increase the demise of memory. The real issue as we age tends to be our inability to not get distracted by so many other memories. That is why something as simple as getting up to make a cup of tea can be confusing. We get to the kitchen and have been distracted by a number of other memories on the way so by the time we arrive we have no recollection of what we are doing there! It is more a focussing than a memory issue. Mindfulness, again, can improve focus and reduce distractions. Simply being more aware of the wandering mind can draw our attention back to the present.

Positive Affect

The third area that impacts the leader’s cognitive abilities is Positive Affect (put more simply, being happy). While happy, we improve our creativity and problem-solving. Higher hits of dopamine (the positive-reward neurotransmitter associated with novelty) create a continued positive spiral of improved thinking. Unlike when we are over-stressed, when happy we retain neutral and positive memories, which keeps us feeling positive and resourceful.

Issues arise when a leader becomes isolated by being overly involved in their work – sometimes so much that what makes them happy (friends and loved ones, exercise and hobbies) becomes hard to fit into the expectations of their senior corporate position. This is why executive coaches often focus on a senior leader’s personal life as much as their business goals. This can make an invaluable contribution not only to their happiness but also to business outcomes.

The best news about this is what has been called the “greatest discovery in neuroscience in 400 years” by Norman Doidge, MD, author of the recent best seller, “The Brain that Changes Itself”.  We previously believed the brain to be fixed and rigid, only disintegrating from its peak. Neuroscience has now discovered “neuroplasticity” – the ability for the brain to change. The key to this is attention. By working with goals and paying regular attention to them (mindful attention with attention density) – which can occur through working with a professional coach – the brain can change.

A brain may actually prove that “every cloud has a silver lining”. Thus a brain that has formed habits of procrastination can become one of action. A brain constantly full and never present can learn to be in charge of thinking rather than a victim of it. A brain that has only ever led people from the front, rather than creating leaders at every level, can become a leader of leaders.

Neuroscience and NeuroLeadership are changing our understanding and relationship with thinking, processing, memory, influencing and collaborating abilities, and ultimately our happiness and success in life. It is no fad to be finally cracking the code of leadership from a scientific, brain-based perspective. We are all hungry to understand human nature and how we can maximise our performance and outcomes, and the brain is the source of it all.

For more information on these topics, please contact :

Kristen Hansen of EnHansen Performance atKristen@enhansenperformance.com.au or

            +61 414 504 797