Can Modern Right Brain Languaging Transform Modern Careers?

     “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
     – Ludwig Wittenstein

Can Modern Right Brain Languaging Transform Modern Careers? 

Or: We're not going to think new ideas in old language...

By Sandra H. Rodman
CEO, Right Brain Aerobics
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What if we added “Intuitive Business Intelligence” to a College MBA Curriculum?  Or “Practical Alpha State Mental Exercises for Managers”?  Sounds like intriguing courses – probably already in a curriculum somewhere.  Trendy.  21^st Century.  

“In 2009 the “Positive Psychology” course at Harvard University was the most oversubscribed course for all first-semester students.”  From "GrossNational Happiness: The Key to a More Inspired Future?" New Paradigm Digest.

But what if we scheduled “Paranormal Training for Managers”?  “Ghost Hunting Skills for Victorian Estate Realtors”?  Not so much.  We’re new thinkers.  Our left brains would start an alarm sequence track to Defcon 1.   

Yet in the July 3, 2012 cover article for Psychology Today -- “The 6^th Sense”– there is a surprising amount of esoteric, arcane reference in contexts that seem appropriate for decades ago.  Why? The language itself predicts the trivialization or irrelevance of discussing such skills – yet on other fronts from brain science to business training these are showing up regularly!  Especially since Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future” began to open new doorways for global right brain dialogue in business. 

Early adopters in Business, apparently, being primarily bottom-line driven in rapidly changing economic environments, are arleady experimenting with right brain approaches as global shifts require really new responses to change -- and fast.  There’s little time to resolve a mind-body debate or contemplate too long whether more creative perception is useful. If business case studies and successes in training right brain creativity/meditation//intuition show brain-building and better management skills -- no time for debate. The invasion of “right brain” bestselling business books that began in 2005 (A Whole New Mind, Blink, Blue Ocean Strategy, The 10 Faces of Innovation, The Flight of the Creative Class) – has become commonplace. The landscape has already changed.  This is positioned, however, in modern business and career language.

Such as in Dan Pink's books or Malcolm Gladwell's famous "Blink" business bestseller.  These books include not just redirecting focus to innovative mental processes but research/case studies on intuitive-meditation-creative right brain business approaches that would seem out of place in the 2012 Psychology Today article.  What gives?

Is Modern Right Brain Languaging actually a Breakthrough for 21^st Century Mind?

Already business thinkers seem willing to push the envelope with new right brain thinking/languaging as perhaps a key differentiator for Next Gen social-networked leaders who want to, emulating Apple, lead by “thinking different” -- like the self-defined “crazy ones” in the famous early Apple ads:

"...they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." -- Steve Jobs

This quote -- iconic for an era -- is a spectacular example of the power of "modern right brain languaging"! We must now look anew at Marshall McLuhan's prophetic envisioning:

"The medium is the message..." -- Marshall McLuhan

But modern times among globally interconnected cultures, the “languaging” IS a medium. I found out pretty quickly that I didn’t even want to try to wrap my brain around the older languaging of the paranormal and ghosts in the article -- it was stunting my free-soaring languaging about how supersensory career skills can be realized in the layers of a team's gestalt consciousness!  That suggests:

Modern Right Brain Languaging May, in Itself, Have the Power to Affect Superconscious Cognition!

To repeat our subtitle: "We're not going to think new ideas in old language!"  This goes deeper into Einstein's adage about the difficulty of trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.  It's the languaging as well.  It holds subtle, non-linear clues -- though language is thought linear.  Our associations with it are not.

 It is possible that high level right brain skills development and advanced consciousness studies will be the most important thing to hit many industries in eons.  

But it will enter more and more seamlessly – not being trained or applied in contexts like the Psychology Today story – but in practical business and counseling case studies.  We’re in a new time zone for psyche-ology.  We have a lot more right brain thinkers with new language.  That makes the skill set – not just the words – translatable for modern societies and work.  Success and self-understanding can be redefined in new self-discovery. (See examples in Tom Rodman’s Blog, 7 Principles for Applying RightBrain Thinking to Counseling)

In This Case, the Medium Is Both "Barrier" and "Doorway"

The language itself is going to raise or lower barriers -- raise or lower out ability to wrap our brains around natural, mind-boggling skills.  After looking through this article, my sense was that this was a much more important, multidimensional issue than it first seemed.  And a clue perhaps to upcoming "next big things."  We may be an in age of "power mind" training fueled by brain science breakthroughs.  But I have renewed my resolve to make it available in organic form, as I have seen it displayed -- without chemicals, drugs, technology, electrical zapping, chips in the brain; it's quite possible to amaze yourself with a new mind anytime, anywhere, and you always have the lab with you.

When we teach this as “right brain aerobics,” it’s practical and career-focused “right brain business skills” – developing a more “multidimensional intelligence,”  That language lets me think about it in new ways. 

The output from business/career trainees has been quite exceptional from my vantage point as observer; I would give anything to have had these transferrable techniques when I was still in corporations. The “right brainstorming” in alpha or “ah hah” brain states is a spectacular experience for me. It exposes potential very differently than brainstorming sessions I participated in within unusual business settings.

Unusually high levels of valuable insight by trainees and leaders, consistent and repeatable – is just something else altogether from that which I experienced in corporations. And a lot of people who’ve gone through such modern-language-right-brain-skill-building experiences report similar observations.  Partly because we can report them more accurately in mainstream career language! It seems true creativity isn't about ideas for new gadgets for "landfill planet" -- our signature piece --  it is a longer-range, far deeper intelligence; it is how to build realities from compassionate personal revelation -- and that is a real surprise.

So a discovery:  An accidental result in creating “right brain aerobics for business” was the noticeable %+ effect from the use of modern “right brain languaging” in groups describing the potential of new realities. 

It seems to enable a kind of dissolving of paradigmatic resistance, causing barriers to higher understanding to fall away – and unfamiliarity with right brain territory to yield with practice -- leading to new maps and words for describing the extraordinary of the mind.  I was a successful innovator in my careers – but I can’t imagine a time even then, when it was possible to, routinely and with a simple technique, access different brain states for “quantum leaps” of mind. I just never experienced anything quite like this before or found such a good use for the word “gobsmacked”!  It is a remarkable thing to be "gobsmacked" over 65.  That changes your life...

Thus: New Right Brain Languaging May Be the Hidden Key to New Societal Thinking 

Just how important may it be -- for all of us in every discipline of thought -- to begin to translate hyperboles of consciousness and creative soaring once thought paranormal or the province of geniuses, into practical “modern right brain languaging.” Perhaps the key to rapidly develop exceptional “inner genius” or “multidimensional intelligence” skills for 21^st century life, love, and business.  Creating, no doubt, not simply "A Whole New MInd" -- but a whole new world of these minds...

Sandra H. Rodman

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(c) 2012, S.H. Rodman.  Photo Credit: iStockPhotos.