Words Can Change Your Brain (14 page)

If you watch the video of Nexi at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQS2zxmrrrA, you’ll see how emotionally effective she can be.

The Million-Dollar Smile

A smile has enormous power: it can even change the electromagnetic activity of your brain.
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But the ideal smile, as Leonardo da Vinci discovered, is really a half smile, because it enhances the quality of gently gazing eyes.
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A broad toothy smile will have the opposite effect. It often implies that the person is covering up anger or fear. Anxiety and irritability can make your jaw tense up, and if you try to smile, it appears forced.

It takes a special inner
feeling, a feeling of genuine enjoyment, to generate a
Mona Lisa
smile. This “felt” smile, as researchers call it, can be elicited by a pleasurable experience, image, feeling, or thought, and when a person experiences this type of smile, their empathy toward others increases.
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When you learn how to consciously generate and maintain this smile throughout the day, you’ll feel more positive, your work will feel more pleasant,
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and it will improve the demeanor of anyone you talk with because smiling has a contagious effect.
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It will also strengthen the brain’s ability to maintain a positive outlook on life.
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From the moment of birth, smiling, trust, and social empathy are neurologically entwined. When a mother sees a happy infant, dopamine is released in her brain’s reward centers, and she smiles too.
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Infants will also initiate a smile in order to communicate with a parent,
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but if the mother is being inattentive, the smile will quickly fade away.
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This is just another reminder that when we engage in conversations with others, we need to give them our fullest attention or their happiness will likewise fade away.

Gazing into the Eyes of the Beloved

Like many revelations in science, we accidentally discovered a way that will generate a Mona Lisa smile and gaze. In one of our Compassionate Communication seminars, Mark was preparing to guide the participants through the eye-gazing exercise described above. Normally, about 70 percent of the participants would begin to feel uncomfortable within the first minute.

Because the group was small, Mark decided to try something different. After everyone paired up, he had them close their eyes, and he guided them through a relaxation exercise. Then he asked them to think about someone they deeply loved, or a memory that brought them a deep sense of pleasure and satisfaction, visualizing it with as much detail as possible. Within a matter of seconds, everyone in the room seemed to radiate a blissful expression, the smile that Leonardo captured so beautifully in his painting.

When the participants opened their eyes to gaze at the person they were facing, the smiles seemed to grow more intense, and when Mark asked them to talk about their experiences, everyone spoke slowly and softly. They all agreed that they felt genuinely cared for by the other person, even though they had never met before.

The following month, Mark guided a group of 110 people through a similar exercise. First he just asked them to gaze at each other for thirty seconds, without any preparation. When he asked how many people felt discomfort, about three-quarters of the participants raised their hands. He asked them to pair up with someone different, and then guided them through the visualization exercise. The same soft smile emerged on nearly everyone’s face.

Mark asked the group to open up their eyes and to gaze at the other person for two minutes. How many people felt uncomfortable with the gazing? Only four hands were raised.

A 2010 brain-scan study validated this anecdotal evidence. At the Institute of Neuroscience in Taiwan, researchers discovered that imagining a loved one promotes greater empathy and compassion for others by stimulating activity in the anterior cingulate and the insula.
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The same areas are stimulated when mothers view their smiling infants and when people engage in loving-kindness meditations.
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Give it a try, right now. Take a few deep breaths and bring yourself into the present moment. Relax all the muscles in your face, your jaw, your neck, your shoulders, and your arms. Take a few more deep breaths and think about someone you deeply care for or recall an event in your life that brought you deep satisfaction and joy. Imagine that you’re right there, with that special person, or in that special place, and feel how that
Mona Lisa
smile begins to light up your face.

Now take that smile into the world and share it with as many people as you can.

PART 2

The Strategies

Developing New Communication Skills

C
HAPTER 7

Inner Values

The Foundation of Conscious Living

_“N
o” may be one of the most powerful words in the world, but it’s not necessarily the most powerful word in
your
life. You’ll have to discover for yourself what the most powerful word in your life is, but it will be a word that encapsulates the most important principle in your life. And when it informs the other words you say, it will both protect you from being knocked off balance in verbal conflicts and help you to stay focused on achieving your personal and professional goals.

The question that will help you identify this word is an essential one in every person’s life, and yet one we rarely ask ourselves. In fact, it’s so rare that if you enter any variation of it as a Google search, it brings up fewer than fifty results. Yet a question like “What makes me happy?” can bring up as many as twenty-eight million hits.

For this exercise, we’d like you to have a pen and a piece of paper handy, and as we’ve done in most of the previous exercises, to start by taking a few minutes to ground yourself. When you feel fully relaxed, ask yourself: what is my
deepest,
innermost value?

Close your eyes for at least sixty seconds, listening to your inner voices and paying attention to whatever thoughts and feelings float through your mind. Then open your eyes and write down a single word or brief phrase that captures your deepest value.

If nothing occurs to you, close your eyes again and stay focused on the question for another couple of minutes until a word comes to mind. Write it down, and repeat the question: what is my deepest, innermost
value? If a different word comes to mind—and it often does—write that one down as well. Repeat this step several more times, to see if other essential values rise into consciousness.

Now look at your list of words, and circle the one that feels the truest for you at this moment. Close your eyes once more and repeat the word or phrase to yourself, silently and then aloud. Notice how it feels
to say it, and then compare it to the other words you wrote down.

What is the point of doing such an exercise? According to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Reflecting on personal values can keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress at low levels.”
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This is truly amazing: by simply pondering and affirming your deepest values you’ll improve the health of your brain, you’ll protect yourself from burnout at work, you’ll reduce your propensity to ruminate about failure, and you’ll be less reactive and defensive when someone confronts you with uncomfortable information.
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The Ten-Day Experiment

Try doing this “inner values” exercise for the next ten days. It’s the first assignment Mark gives to his students on the first day of class in the Executive MBA Program at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, one of the top-ranked business schools in the world. This specialized program is designed for full-time managers, executives, and business leaders who need to learn advanced skills for maintaining a growing and successful company.

Here’s what we’d like you to do. Each morning, shortly after you wake up, take a few moments to stretch, breathe deeply, and relax. Then ask yourself, what is my deepest, innermost value? Create a log and record your words, along with any feelings or reactions you have relating to doing the exercise. Do this for ten days, and on day eleven briefly answer the following seven questions, using only a single sheet of paper. Be spontaneous in your responses, and remember that there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. They’re only designed to deepen the self-reflective process.

1. What was your initial reaction to this exercise?

2. Was the exercise enjoyable, boring, interesting, annoying, etc.?

3. How long did you spend, each day, contemplating your inner values?

4. Did the exercise have any effect on other aspects of your day, work, or life?

5. How do you define the word “value”?

6. Did you discover anything about yourself?

7. Did the exercise influence the way you think about your work and business values?

In Mark’s class this homework assignment was optional, and the students who completed it were asked to submit their daily logs, along with the answers to the above questions, anonymously. He didn’t ask them for their names because he really wanted to know if the exercise had any immediate or lasting value for the busy executives enrolled in the program.

In the end nearly everyone found the exercise useful, enlightening, and enjoyable, but it didn’t start out that way. Some were intrigued, others were bored, and a few actually became irritated with the assignment. One student—a chief operating officer at a midsize corporation—put it bluntly: “What the *#!* does this have to do with financial planning?” But by the end of the ten days, he wrote the following comment: “I think that this exercise should be taught to every MBA student in America.” He was not alone, as the following excerpts illustrate, taken from the students’ written responses to the seven questions listed above:

At first I thought, “Who has time for this?” I barely have enough minutes in the day to run my company, and the workload for the MBA class is overwhelming. But those couple of minutes each morning helped me stay calm and focused for the rest of the day. I plan to do this exercise for the rest of the school year.

The moment I awake, my mind rushes to plan the day. This exercise made me realize that I’m undermining my health. I get the most from it when I practice five to ten minutes a day, and I’ve noticed that the quality and quantity of my sleep has improved. I know I have strong values, but I’ve never taken the time to acknowledge it.

I really became more conscious about my emotions, and how they could sabotage my evenings with my wife. Once, after having a fight with her, I spent thirty minutes sitting alone, thinking about the value of my marriage. I went back and apologized, and we worked our problem out.

I used my positive word all day long. I felt calmer, less stressed, and it seemed to help when it came to solving difficult problems at work. I loved the self-awareness it brought, and the way it made me feel throughout the day.

The core values that kept coming up for me were honesty, integrity, and family. It made me think about my business ethics and values, and what was really essential for work. I realized that I’d rather climb the ladder of success more slowly so I can support the people I meet along the way, and give more time to my family.

This exercise grounded me in the principles of goodness and the desire to live by my deepest principles. For me, work can drown out the self-talk of my core values. When that happens, I can’t truly express who I am or realize my greatest potential.

At first I hated this exercise, but it forced me to reexamine my priorities. I realized that business is not just about numbers and money. I think everyone needs to find at least two minutes a day to think about their values and principles and how to use them to build a life-sustaining career and personality.

More than a third of the students said that the exercise inspired them to become more involved in spiritual pursuits like meditation, even though no mention had been made of them. But even more surprising, several people wrote that they were going to restructure their companies to be more values oriented. One CEO asked every member of his company to write up a personal “mission and values” statement, which he collated and distributed to the class.