Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (18 page)

Here's an example of what I mean by the master set shifter's attitude and skill on the mental throttle:

You're in the middle of preparing dinner, and you get interrupted by a phone call. The less-than-organized mind is not prepared for this interruption, not willing to allow it much less embrace it. It's an annoyance, a distraction. The organized mind—the master set shifter—sees it differently. The organized mind stops in midpreparation and takes the call. Ten minutes later, when you resume your cooking, you remember, “Oh gosh, I have fresh basil growing in my garden! That would really add a nice taste to this pasta sauce.”

Voilà! You unhooked the brain from its tether and allowed it to wander off from thoughts of recipes and cooking during the phone call, and in that space, new ideas bubbled up, as welcome as the warm and delicious aroma that is emanating from your pot.

Skilled set shifting can be strategic as well. Think about how it could help you at work. You're plugging away at that PowerPoint presentation you have to deliver, and you arrive at this point of diminishing returns where you just feel you're spinning your wheels. You could throw your hands up in disgust, adding to your feeling of disorganization and disarray. Instead, a strategic set, stop and shift can change the game—when you say “I'm not getting further on
this,
so I'm going to jump on to
that.
” Make a phone call, check e-mails, take a break. That's the deliberate intention choice—and very often it will result in the fresh idea and the new perspective that pops into your mind when you jump back on the original PowerPoint task.

We chose that verb—
jump
—deliberately. A shift is like a leap, letting your feet leave the ground for a moment and jumping from one wire in your brain to another. The shift brings new insights, new ideas and
new thoughts that will eventually improve your performance on the task temporarily left behind. A deliberate shift is an opportunity not to be missed to get out of a trench and rise to a higher viewpoint.

You can't force set shifting—it's almost a state of mind; when you suddenly remember the basil that makes the meal, you have no idea why talking to your mother on the phone brought this on. But it did.

Still, while you can't summon up a set shift on command, you can create the conditions for it to occur when the opportunities present themselves. You need to be open to it and ready to make that leap.

Here are some suggestions on how to make yourself the master set shifter—a critical step in getting yourself better organized.

Get light on your cognitive feet

Except for professional basketball players or track stars, most of us find it hard to jump, and don't do it very often unless we are asked by a cute leader in spandex of an exercise session. Gravity is a tough force to beat. Sometimes we are prone to resist jumping because it feels more comfortable to stay in the groove of a task.

If you've ever woken up suddenly from an intense dream, you'll recall the sense of amazement at your brain's ability to leap around in wild ways to wild places. Unbridled by the demands of the day, our brains show their raw potential to roam untethered to reality.

Let's wake up and put the “roaming” power of our brains to work. Remember, also, that when our frenzy has been tamed and our brains are more organized, our thoughts start to feel lighter and more agile. Getting better at all of the rules that we've shared so far will help you lighten up.

Bust a silo!

You may have heard this term before. “Silo busting” was a hot buzz phrase in business a few years ago. “People talked about ‘operating in
silos,' meaning they weren't acting cohesively,” writes executive coach and blogger Linda Henman. “The metaphor was apt since the new meaning also meant to communicate you'd have to crawl over a barrier to get a message to someone in another silo.”

Silo busting was targeted at people in an organization who get so locked into their own department, specialty or individual “silo” that they were unable or unwilling to see or think about connections with other silos. Busting these boundaries, the thinking went, would help stimulate interchange and interaction with different parts of the organization, leading to new, happy and productive collaborations.

Implicit in the act of silo busting is the skill of set shifting. That is what happens in those spaces between the silos: perspectives must be changed and new situations, new people and new and unexpected ideas reacted to. And it's not just limited to the business world. In many areas of science, the greatest discoveries do not emerge in the narrow silo of one specialty but in the cracks between or among specialties—in the spaces outside the narrow field of vision of the specialist.

A way to practice set shifting—the cognitively “light on your feet” skill we've been talking about—is to deliberately try and think like a silo buster. These don't have to be radical, shake-the-world changes, although you may find yourself leaping to new insights that improve the quality of your professional life!

Shift from mental to physical

You've heard me say this before in previous chapters: it's amazing how our bodies and minds support each other. Sometimes the shift we need is to get out of our heads and into our bodies—standing up during a long meeting and stretching, taking a walk around the corridors or the block, doing some yoga stretches or taking a few deep breaths. Many studies have shown the cognitive benefits of physical activity; certainly
the “clearing your head” effect is one of them—in this case, clearing and refreshing the mind as surely as it does the muscles. Just as surely as your back and neck feel more supple after that stretch and your legs less tight after a brief walk, so will your mind feel fresher and more flexible—ready and able to shift sets.

At the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, employee wellness manager Bill Baun has installed eighteen “stress-busting stations” throughout the Center's facilities for use by everyone from secretaries to surgeons. The stations consist of an elliptical machine, a Precor stretching machine and a special chair with resistance tubing. “We encourage people to take a ‘microbreak,'” says Baun, an exercise physiologist and wellness coach. “You don't have to get sweaty; you don't have to do a twenty-minute workout. What we've found is that those who use our stress-busting stations even for just three to five minutes not only release their stress, but also find that that they're more creative, more effective and have more energy on the job.”

In other words, just a few minutes of stretching, cardio or resistance training puts them in a place where they are ready to react agilely to new situations and take fresh perspectives on the task at hand or the next challenge coming around the bend. Is there proof of the value to these innovative stations in helping to foster this kind of set shifting and creative thinking? At one point, Baun notes, he and his staff relocated the stress-busting station located on the bridge between the surgeons' offices and the operating rooms. “I had surgeons calling to ask me what happened to their station,” Baun says. “‘I won't operate before I get on that elliptical machine,' one of them told me.
That's
significant.”

Welcome and appreciate the opportunity to shift

Rather than being annoyed or irritated at a call for a shift in your attention, treat it as a welcome messenger or a possibility for new insight and
clarity. It's an invitation to rise above the weight of the task at hand—even better, rise above a disorganized life. Greet it with a smile and light energy just as you might notice a much-loved child, mate or pet. Mindfully ask “How can this shift help me perform better?” The answer may not come until later. The shift may be an opportunity not to be missed.

This attitude should be fostered in your personal as well as professional life: Let's say that you regularly spend the holidays at your spouse's parent's house. It's a comfortable routine you've gotten used to over the years. Suddenly, your spouse announces that this year you're going to visit a sister in Ohio instead.

Now you don't mind the sister, but her husband is a bore; they live in a rural part of the state, far from the attractions and stimulations of a city or major town. It's going to be a longer trip—and the weather probably colder. How do you react?

The plodding, lead-footed brain will go along with this change in holiday venues only under duress, complaining and either slow or reluctant to try and even analyze, much less welcome this new opportunity. The flexible, light-footed mind—the master set shifter—does exactly the opposite. It doesn't mean that you have to pretend to suddenly find the brother-in-law's company stimulating or that you must relish a long drive to an off-the-beaten-path location. It's not even a “grin and bear it” attitude. Instead, the set shifter pivots and changes directions, looking at what might be good about this new “set” or preferable to the old one. (Hey, your sister-in-law's a good cook! And did you know they live near a big state park with beautiful walking trails…and if it snows, you can rent snowshoes, something you've always wanted to try?)

Make a beautiful decision

Often when a potential shift presents itself, there's a decision to be made. Stop and consider your options: Should you stay at the task at
hand or shift to the new task? What are the benefits of either option? Which one wins? Be fully present and awake to the choice. Engage your thoughts and feelings. What do you think about the choice? How do you feel about the choice? Come to a decision; this can all happen rapidly and beautifully.

Don't confuse multitasking with shifting gears

As Dr. Hammerness explained earlier, multitasking isn't about nimble jumping or leaping to engage in new tasks with a shifted attention and focus. It's about attending to multiple tasks simultaneously and mindlessly without deliberate shifting to or from one task to another and back again—or onto something else.

So whatever you do in shifting the set, don't try to do both. Don't try to shift to the new opportunity or task while continuing to attend to the one you were originally focused on. It won't work—both will suffer. Again, think light feet: attend to the new situation and, if necessary,
then
return to the other, hopefully with a new and fresh perspective.

Be a confident jumper!

Whatever the new task or situation—a change in work assignments, a new vacation venue or an interruption that compels you to attend to something else—jump into the new task with both feet, holding the intention of greater performance on the task left behind. Focus with mindfulness and appreciation of the opportunity. Let go of fretting and frenzy. Don't allow yourself to doubt your switch. Trust that the switch will bring new clarity and insight to the newly embraced task as well as the one set aside for a while.

When you return to the task you left behind, stop and pay attention to your mind-set before you shifted and notice where you are now. What is new? What happened to your energy level? Do you find
yourself renewed and revitalized? What discoveries have emerged almost effortlessly? What gifts did the shifting bring?

The way to anchor the development of a new skill or behavior, such as set shifting, is to notice the rewards early and often to reinforce what might feel difficult at first. The joy of a new idea, insight or perspective is something we all need more of. It's a key step on your way to the organized life.

N
OW WE'RE GETTING TO THE IMPORTANT PART.
It's time to put it all together, and you are ready. Frenzy has been tamed. Attention is focused. Impulses have been controlled. Memory is tuned. Shifting happens.

You have approached the challenge of getting organized in steps, as individual efforts, following individual Rules of Order. You have taken one positive and organized step at a time and, hopefully, you are already seeing some benefits in your day-to-day life. Practice makes perfect. It takes time to develop a new pattern, a new way of living. Now, we must integrate and orchestrate the discrete steps to yield an organized life—one that goes far beyond your ability to simply remember where you left your car keys.

Before we get into the how-to—and the exciting possibilities of what this can lead to—let's remember our scientific journey and talk a bit more about the organized brain as a whole. We started this endeavor by looking at specific inner regions of the primitive, emotional brain—and
the necessity in taming them and controlling powerful emotions that can flood over us and paralyze our thinking brain.

Having regained mastery of our emotions, we then traversed the highly evolved, complex, interconnected areas of the 21st-century thinking brain. You can now visualize regions of your wondrous brain firing away as you hone and apply individual skills, like paying attention and shifting set. Now we want to focus on the incredible circuitry working in concert to make it all come together.

We have referred to the importance of connectivity in brain function all along and, by extension, its importance in the Rules of Order, the skills you can learn and the behaviors you can adopt to better organize your life. But before Coach Meg shows you how to do that, we think it's important in this “pulling-it-all-together” chapter to understand a little bit of how science is also, in a sense, pulling it all together to better understand the overall orchestration of the brain.

In recent years there has been a real explosion of studies on brain connectivity and how the billions—yes,
billions
—of brain cells come together as a working, organized unit via trillions—yes,
trillions
—of brain cell connections. With sophisticated studies and new technologies, scientists are identifying networks in the human brain and understanding how it is organized for large-scale, globally integrated processing. These brain networks allow for maximum efficiency with minimal energy or “wiring cost” (it often involves working smarter, not necessarily harder). Scientists also describe highly connected hubs in the brain, especially critical for the whole network to function. In its organization, the brain has the remarkable ability to perform small-scale, local processing as well.

Several proposed brain networks relate to our efforts to be organized.

The first is an alerting network, responsible for keeping us awake and vigilant to new information and opportunities. This is very clearly a critical basic network, the one that “activates” us, helping us to be prepared and poised for action.

Second, there's an orientation network that takes this “alerted you” and enables you to mobilize your resources to respond—or “orient”—yourself to the new information and stimuli.

And then finally, the executive control network gets involved; these are the brain areas in charge of your thinking, feeling, action—your responses. This network includes brain areas like the anterior cingulate cortex and frontal cortex—regions we have talked about before as being important in efforts to pay attention, focus and so forth.

The three networks function almost as a ready-set-go mechanism. Like a sprinter in a race, the alerting (“ready”) network gets you poised and prepared for the race that is imminent; the orienting (“set”) network puts you down into your sprinter's “crouch,” preparing for action and orienting to the next critical sound: the firing of the starter's gun. The executive control (“go!”) network springs into action at the sound of the shot, pulling it all together—the mechanics of your stride, the proper form, the awareness of who's in the next lane and what your competitor's strengths are—as you race down the track.

What's also important to keep in mind as we seek to understand the way these networks function is their interconnectedness. So we can also imagine them as systems strung together, not unlike the way various parts of a major U.S. city are interconnected through cables and wires—all with crisscrossing signals back and forth, keeping us in constant communication and responsive.

Of course, these analogies attempt to simplify a highly complex process—and one that we don't fully understand. Still, while there is much mystery remaining about these networks and how they interact,
some answers may soon be forthcoming: in the fall of 2010, the National Institutes of Health awarded grants totaling $40 million to map the human brain's connections using the most powerful brain-imaging techniques available. The Human Connectome Project will yield insight into how brain connections underlie brain function.

These initial grants will support two collaborating research projects led by researchers at Washington University, St. Louis; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University, Boston; and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “We're planning a concerted attack on one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st-century,” explained Washington University's David Van Essen, PhD, who coleads one of the groups with Minnesota's Kamil Ugurbil, PhD. “The Human Connectome Project will have a transformative impact, paving the way toward a detailed understanding of how our brain circuitry changes as we age and how it differs in psychiatric and neurologic illness.”

Said Michael Huerta, PhD, of the National Institute of Mental Health, who directs the National Institutes of Health connectome initiative: “On a scale never before attempted, this highly coordinated effort will use state-of-the-art imaging instruments, analysis tools and informatics technologies—and all of the resulting data will be freely shared with the research community. Individual variability in brain connections underlies the diversity of our thinking, perception and motor skills, so understanding these networks promises advances in brain health.”

The Washington/Minnesota team plans to map the brain connections (aka connectomes) in 1,200 healthy adults. This project will examine the influence of genes and the environment on brain connections, as the sample includes identical and fraternal twins. Researchers will look at brain activity at rest and when subjects are performing
tasks—such as the ones we have discussed in prior chapters—using a connectome scanner, which will incorporate new imaging approaches, ten times faster imaging and enhanced clarity of images. Moreover, the brain scans will be complemented by movies of millisecond brain electrical activity using a technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG). That's a mouthful, I realize, but it's a remarkable new technology: MEG is a noninvasive procedure, in which subjects lie on a bed while wearing a helmet-shaped device containing magnetic field sensors distributed in a grid over the inner surface. These super-sensitive sensors are able to detect the magnetic fields produced by brain activity and may give a more complete and higher resolution image of the brain in action.

The Massachusetts General Hospital/UCLA consortium will be using a brain scanner system four to eight times as powerful as conventional systems. The team—Bruce Rosen, MD, PhD, and Van J. Wedeen, MD, both of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, and Arthur Toga, PhD, of UCLA—will use brain-scanning technology to map the brain's fibrous long-distance, white-matter connections. In order to best understand the brain's connections, each fiber connecting brain cells and their paths must be mapped. The Massachusetts General team has pioneered a brain-scanning technique that identifies these paths, according to the movement of water along them. This technique, called diffusion spectrum imaging, enables one to make an image of the myriad brain connections and also shows where fibers overlap with each other in an amazingly complex web of cognition.

At the same time as these two projects in the United States, others in the international scientific community are beginning to demonstrate unprecedented, worldwide scientific collegiality in order to help unlock some of the mysteries of brain connectivity. The launch of the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project (FCP) in December 2009 by leading
brain imagers has been heralded by many in the scientific community as marking a new era of discovery for human brain function.

This project will allow for unrestricted data sharing among scientists. It began with the inclusion of one thousand brain-imaging data sets collected from dozens of centers around the world. With it, scientists from all over the world can literally and figuratively put their heads together to create the definitive map of the functional networking and connections of the human brain—aka the “connectome.”

It appears as if we are entering a time when we can anticipate enormous advances in our understanding of the most complex and remarkable of human organisms. With your reading of this book, you are poised to understand many of the discoveries that are about to emerge. But at this moment, the most important connections you need to make in this final Rule of Order are behavioral. You're ready to pull together and harmonize the skills that we've talked about in previous chapters and that you've practiced. Coach Meg will show you how to do this using some of
her
case studies in organizational success.

CONNECT THE DOTS: COACH MEG'S CASE STUDIES AND SOLUTIONS

What is the ultimate goal of the organized brain?

Is it to lead a hyperefficient life where one is always on time and never late; a life in which every moment is productive and accounted for, where no one ever wastes time; a life spent with a home that is pin-neat, with a garage in which everything is labeled and stored in its proper shelf and receptacle?

Of course not.

Even if those were realistic goals, is that really how we want to live? (Well, okay, maybe the organized garage.)

The real goal of the organized brain is to be able to see the big picture and act on it—living from a higher plane of order. Think about it: in the important domains of our life—such as work, home, relationship, friends and community, our personal health—we're mostly stuck in the weeds when we're disorganized—gets tangled in the underbrush of missed opportunities, poor planning, ineffective communication and ceaseless distraction.

When we are organized and on top of things, the chaos of day-today life—and let's face it, there's always going to be some kind of disruption or chaos, in at least one of those domains—is greeted, handled, fielded. We might not be able to change the fact that the car broke down or that the department's budget got cut or that our daughter missed an important soccer practice. But when we're organized we can rise above it; we can better deal with these crises, no matter how small or large. We can better roll with those punches and do what it takes to ensure that some—not all, but some—of those miscues and moments of chaos will not reoccur. And we can do it without having tantrums and without making the situation worse and pushing ourselves deeper into the weeds, deeper into a spiral of further disorder.

Each domain has different degrees of organization. Many people are better organized at work than at home because in the office they are expected to perform, they're accountable and they darn well
better
be organized. But while you may have a neat and tidy desk at work, you may also have an expanding waistline and notice various aches and pains…but, well, you never seem to find time to exercise or see a doctor. Or you could feel a spiritual void in your life…but, gee, you never can get it together enough to get to church on Sundays or find a few moments here and there to pray or meditate. You are often testy with your spouse, but you don't really seem to get a chance to enjoy each other's company anymore…because, hey, we're too busy working and raising kids!

Those are all the fig leaves of disorganization. No one can have it all and do it all. No one advocates a life of robotlike efficiency. That's not what this book has been about. But we can make sure that we see the big picture, in every domain of our lives.

One of the key points we've made throughout this book is that your brain is wired for organization and that you can, in essence, learn from yourself, learn some of the skills and tap into some of the abilities that you already possess in order to become more organized, more in control and less overwhelmed in every facet of life.

If you've been following along, and working on assimilating some of these skills—through our tips and suggestions in the previous chapters—you should be getting to a point where you are ready to put it all together—ready to take the leap out of the weeds and up to a much clearer vantage point.

How we put those first five Rules of Order together—synthesizing them in order to propel us out of the weeds of confusion and into the calm, clear, blue skies above the chaos—is the focus of this last part, this last Rule of Order. And we depart from the structure of the earlier part of the book by offering you my case studies.

Yes, as a coach, I work with individuals too, many of whom have the same concerns about disorganization in their lives. The difference is that Dr. Hammerness's patients are coming to him with issues that often have their roots in early childhood, whereas many of my clients are responding to current challenges in one domain of their lives. They are often at impasses where things seem to be spinning out of control.

I help them the way we have worked to help you in this book—by explaining to them the Rules of Order and then putting them all together, by giving them wings and confidence and by providing them with the tools to achieve the ultimate goal of the organized mind, which is the organized life. That is a life in which you have a sense of purpose
and a sense of what you're trying to achieve, a life in which you see the moving parts and can keep them working together harmoniously, a life where you make good decisions and sound choices on most days. A life in which you soar—and flourish.