To be balanced and well, you must be able to work within both sides of your brain. “What? My brain has two sides? No wonder I’m of two minds about so many things,” quips the witty exec. For those who’ve been buried in their work and missed the entire left brain/right brain discussion over the past 20 years, here it is in a capsule.
The human brain (and most other animal brains, for that matter) is divided both anatomically and functionally into two halves: the left brain and the right brain. The left brain houses our logical, rational, analytical, mathematical and sequential-linear thought processes. It’s also the seat of motor control for speech and language. Being linear and sequential, it’s our internal timekeeper through which we feel the inexorable procession of time going by.
The right brain is the site of our intuitive, artistic, musical, spatial, conceptual and holistic functions. It contributes to speech only indirectly through metaphor, poetry and/or song. In short, the right brain thinks and communicates nonverbally and with symbols that contain the concepts, patterns and rhythms that form the “big picture” of our reality. It’s what gives us our deep intuitive understanding of things beyond mere linear verbal descriptions. It operates in the now, not in little steps that are neatly arranged.
By a peculiarity of crossover wiring in the brainstem, the left brain exerts motor and sensory control over the right half of our bodies while the right brain controls movement and sensation for the left side of the body. The connections between these two cerebral hemispheres are surprisingly sparse and mostly indirect. From this, the old saying “the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth” gains new force and significance. For, in truth, most of us veer strongly toward dominance of one side or the other for our cognitive talents, style, function and personality. This is an inherently asymmetrical situation and inconsistent with the balance required for a state of high-level wellness. For executives, this can have particular significance for one’s effectiveness as a leader.
In the vast literature about leadership, there’s a broad consensus that the most effective leaders are those who use both halves of their brains with equal and conscious skill. Richard Strozzi-Heckler, Ph.D., an internationally known expert on corporate and military executive coaching, calls this “Embodied Leadership.” Achieving this kind of unified left- and right-minded leadership is quite distinct from reading up on tips and techniques about leadership.
Embodied leaders have presence—they know what they care about, stay focused on their goals and can inspire others to follow their vision of the team or organization. They can listen with an open mind, communicate their goals without emotional baggage and encourage their staff to think independently. At the same time, they create the boundaries for acceptable performance. An embodied leader can set aside his or her emotional responses to deal effectively with conflict or uncomfortable situations. This comes naturally for a few people; it can be taught to most of us through a process of learning to integrate the strengths of both sides of our brains. For many people, unfortunately, there are a number of obstacles that get in the way of implementing this goal.
Western society, especially in the realms of science, engineering, military and business enterprise, has long harbored a strong bias toward the rational, logical and analytical. These fields naturally incline toward a left brain emphasis—often insistence—upon step-by-step, supposedly rational (“don’t confuse me with emotion or the big picture!”) and linear thought. They often also focus on the false premise that the world itself should follow the same neat, orderly sequence of cause and effect in marked preference to holistic thinking.
During the past century of colossal scientific and technological advances, this kind of overemphasis upon cold logic has contributed to colossally bad leadership decisions. There’s a pitfall in overemphasizing the logical-positivist worldview to the exclusion of holistic thinking. By the time the mind (especially the left side of it) and nervous system have finished filtering and funneling our sensory experience of reality, there only remains what Aldous Huxley called “a measly trickle” of awareness of what’s going on outside our bodies. And it’s to this limited input that we apply our minds to arrive at the decisions and routines we use to govern our behavior and protect us from harm. If we choose to use only half a brain, usually the left half, what can be said about the quality of our decisions or the likelihood that they’ll lead us toward the path of safety or wellness?
In many ways, “left-brainedness” aptly describes narrow-minded business and governmental policies that lead into economic difficulties and military quagmires. One only need read Robert McNamara’s Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the VietNam Tragedy, about how the super-rationalist (indeed “the best and brightest”) mindset led America into the VietNam conflict, to see that an unbalanced left brain approach to problem solving creates an operational Achilles heel in those who occupy high leadership posts. This can be viewed as an insidious form of “unwellness” that arises from either active suppression or merely neglect of right brain function and its ability to contribute to a more intelligent and balanced approach to life.
Our cultural bias is shown nowhere more clearly than when so-called rational minds systematically and repeatedly push right brain-oriented subjects out of the school curricula; every time a budget crunch arises, the first things to be cut are art, music and “nonintellectual” subjects like shop and home economics. Our school systems continue to largely measure intelligence according to left brain logic, giving little credit to the difficult-to-analyze wonders of the right brain.
Yet it’s the right side of our brain that produces intuition and leaps of insight, “Ah-ha!” experiences and our ability to see the big picture. It’s difficult to test for this, and the current (one is tempted to say “sinister” as in the Latin root “sinestris,” meaning left) mania for uniform testing that assays children only for left brain skills serves to underscore how pervasive this process has become in America. From a wellness perspective, this is tantamount to lobotomizing the next generation and ensuring they’ll be deficient in many aspects of creativity and pattern recognition. Ultimately, it means they’ll have a difficult time achieving the balance necessary for adult wellness. From these will come the next crop of executives, similarly deficient in many qualities essential to effective leadership.
Needed now are executives and other leaders who can actually remember yesterday as more than just “step one” and who distrust purely left brain thinking. Even though our left brains don’t want to admit it, it’s always been the pairing of the two sides of our minds that have created humanity’s most spectacular achievements in science, philosophy, literature, art, government and military endeavors. There are plenty of examples where critical scientific breakthroughs have occurred while the right brain (our intuitive, preverbal cognitive resource) was operating ahead of the pack.
Strategic vision requires an ability to think in metaphors, to seek related patterns in unrelated objects, situations and events. Executive leadership, as an aspect of high-level wellness, depends upon nurturing these special—in fact, indispensable—qualities of the right brain and learning to integrate them into an effective bilateral approach to problem solving and leadership.
Allen Gruber, M.D., is an anesthesiologist and pain management specialist. He’s been living along the Russian River and practicing medicine in Sonoma County for 15+ years. You can reach him at agruber@northbaybiz.com.
