Journaling has been a key ingredient in high-quality leadership programs for some time. Recent Australian research confirms that journaling is a powerful tool that can help leaders move beyond knowing what they want to do as a leader, to actually doing it and embedding these new behaviours into their habitual leadership repertoire. Now the emerging field of neuroscience explains why this is so.
Neuroscience shows us that adopting new behaviours engages the prefrontal cortex which takes a great deal of mental energy. When the new behaviours are replacing an existing behaviour, this drain on our energy levels is amplified by the brains release of error signals. Error signals, which operate in the orbital frontal cortex, can be quite useful in that they prompt us to ‘sit up and pay attention’, however they also draw energy away from the parts of our brain responsible for higher order thinking and lead us to give in to our natural impulse to revert back to our familiar behaviours.
Familiar behaviours require far less mental energy because they utilize an entirely different part of the brain, called the basal ganglia. It is within this part of the brain that neural circuits associated with habitual behaviour are formed, allowing us to perform certain habitual behaviours, such as the mechanics of driving a car, without any conscious thought.
The key to moving from good intentions to sustained changes in behaviour lies in our ability to form new neural circuits associated with the new behaviour. According to Jeffrey Swartz MD and physicist Henry Stapp, such circuits are formed when we pay close mental attention to a specific experience over a period of time. This process is somewhat akin to learning new behaviours, such as sports skills or riding a bike, through repeated exposure and practice. Yet it is the repeated mental attention you pay to the behaviour rather than the behaviour itself, which leads to these new circuits forming.
Taking just five minutes each day at a set time (eg straight after lunch) to reflect on and write about your recent attempts to use new leadership behaviours helps these new neural circuits to form in the basal ganglia part of your brain.