The Success Zone

6. Ignoring the brain Not knowing much about the brain and how learning is expressed in the brain is very much like trying to navigate without understanding your map. We’ve been educating systematically now since the early 1800s, yet only in recent years has the call to understand the brain, as it learns, gathered any [...]

5. Judgement and Assumption Your brain is particularly ‘wired’ to present you with what you are expecting to see. It is wired for assumption: If you are about to buy a brand new red BMW, it is amazing how many red BMWs you see. When you label students, when you give them what you think [...]

Today I am offering a special package offer, to Voice America listeners, of The Success Zone (hard copy, signed) and a copy of Success Zone Classrooms (electronic copy, pdf). I’ll also include the articles mentioned in the interview. Also included with the Success Zone Classrooms manual is a webinar to outline how the manual can [...]

Teaching is a complex social activity, and while teacher training prepares teachers well around content expertise and delivery, very little is done to skill teachers in behaviour management. Behaviour management, in what is already a high-stress profession, remains one of the most significant stressors for teachers, yet little has been done systematically to solve the [...]

Image via Wikipedia Listening is the most powerfully enabling human behaviour. The thing is, we are rarely taught to listen, we learn to listen. Our default listening styles are usually autobiographically oriented: we tend to listen for ourselves. Listening that engages, enables and that helps create a new future, is focussed on the speaker, for [...]

This is required watching for anyone who is concerned with leading improving performance through motivation. It puts to bed the myth that carrot and stick rewards for complex cognitive engagement once and for all. How will this change the way you engage and provide motivation for those you lead. For more, see http://www.theRSA.org Related articles [...]

Image via Wikipedia To name this post as ‘brain-based change’ is a tautology.  ’Brain-based learning’ is very much the same – the fact that we need to label change and learning in this way speaks of how little we pay attention to the brain when we try to create learning or change. 1. Nobody thinks [...]

This video introduces the concept of Blue and Red Zones, and how these states arise out of activity in different parts of the brain.

Image by Orange_Beard via Flickr Listen. That’s it… just listen. Think of two to three people who you know listen to you really well. People who do not interrupt, that just listen. It is more than likely that these people are amongst those that you hold as influential. When we listen to others, more often [...]

Our roads are rich with opportunity to manage and express emotional intelligence and social leadership. Are you a Blue or Red Zone driver? How might this apply as a metaphor to other aspects of life, leadership and relationships? Do you lead with social and emotional wisdom on the road, or do you succumb to the [...]