Summary: Our careers today have become more demanding than ever before. We have access to information in real time. In my line of marketing work, leading a global brand presence, it is important for me to be able to take in data from the world, both positive and negative and make intelligent decisions to move us towards our goals. In order to not only survive but thrive and succeed in todays overwhelming work life, and still feel the energy and accomplishment to spend our time with our families or our other passions. We need to understand how to optimize the way we use our brain. David Rock is amazing because he is able to take such a complex concept such as how our brain works and make it accessible for us to understand. This book is told in Acts like a play where he tells the story of a couple living their life with the wrong point of view and then tells us with the understanding of how the brain works, they are able to affect their lives positively. We follow the day to day life of Emily and Paul, a married couple with two teenage kids. We see how they react to the normal stresses and occurences in life. Emily is promoted as an exec of an event planning company and deals with a variety of stresses that come with her new promotions, that add to her normal day to day stresses in an information driven world. We see her jumping in to her emails, meetings, being thrown into unfamiliar situations and working with her team members, Paul on the other hand is a software consultant who tries to handle everything, clients, suppliers, budgets and pitches. We see his pain and he try to weave his way in the world and keep his business running. We learn in the book that even with all the advances in technology, our brains remain the greatest business asset to any team or workplace. But the secret to efficient and productive performance is to first understand how we think and improve at directing the way we think instead of just letting our default survival driven brain control our lives. If we truly understand how our brain works in detail, then we will be enabled to enhance our effeciency and performance at work and at home. David talks about being a director of our stage, which in our brains case, the stage is our Pre Frontal Cortex. And the things we store in our PFC are actors who we need to direct so that they don’t default to their pre evolved settings to our detriment. We all know the concept of a director in the theater, so keeping with the theater theme in the book. “The director” is our ability to take a step back and observe our own mental functions. It helps us develop the ability to alter our mental states and reactions to achieve the best performance that we can. Allow me to leave you with this. It is very common for us today that if we are not performing at our best, we simply have to work harder. But we need to understand that our brain requires more fuel and rewards to function optimally. This is simply because our brains get tired like any other muscle in our body and is very prone to distraction. It gets is rewards from status, certainty and control. We need to remember that the Pre frontal cortex of our brains have a limited capacity to deal with distraction and process the rest of our brain power because it can only work on one thing at a time, so it then defaults us to getting stressed to try to deal with things and thinks we are in danger of getting attacked by a lion, even if its just a small problem. In order for us to perform optimally and eliminate day to day distractions, we need to find out what it takes to have more choices and autonomy in our lives and the most important of all, to train our brain to be able to stop and reflect, change label of situations so that our fight or flight response does not default to flight which causes our stress levels to jump up.
