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Mind your Brain. You are Amazing . . . . yes YOU

You are amazing…………..yes YOU. You have an amazing brain and mind and you can do amazing things. You can create things that are not there and you can decide on realities that do not exist. Your brain and mind can serve you well or can cause you all sorts of problems; it is a very powerful part of you.

Human beings are very successful as a species. One of the reasons we are so successful is our amazing brains.

Human beings are born with undeveloped brains and a lot of development goes on in the first three years of life. This makes us very good at adapting, and adapting, as we know, helps a species survive and flourish. The human race continues to increase in number every year. This may not be a good thing but it is shows our success as a species.

We can adapt to being born into all sorts of different environments: families in conflict, families with little love, abusive situations, loving families, families where others needs are put before our own, families coping with bereavement and struggles of all different kinds.

As young children we adapt; we ‘suss’ out what is going on with our primitive thinking and limited knowledge and we make the best choices we know how at the time to manage whatever is going on. You will have made decisions about how best to survive and cope in your family of origin.

An example might be a child who is born into a very unemotional family where feelings are not approved of for various reasons. Now emotions are very important to us and very normal and natural and in fact a very useful part of being human. People who have suffered brain damage and lose the ability to feel emotion, find it almost impossible to make decisions. A child born into this family may make an early decision to shut down on his or her feelings and to blank them out. At the time this was the best thing to do.

The problem for human beings is that those ways that we have chosen to adapt to survive and thrive in our families of origin may not be serving us now. Those early decisions and experiences affect our brain and the way it functions. Often we go through life unconsciously (or sometimes consciously) following decisions we made when were quite tiny. In the example above, the person shut down on their feelings but it could be any number of things. Shutting down on natural parts of ourselves has both a psychological and also often a physical cost to us.

These early decisions are often blind spots for us; we are so used to being a certain way or doing a certain thing that we cannot see ourselves objectively. Increasing your self- awareness helps to empower you to understand your process and others and give you tools and choice to do things differently if you choose.

This is the work I love and have been involved in, in various ways, for 25 years. Facilitating others in their own awareness, helping people to see those blind spots is fascinating and rewarding work, I know that the insights that people gain will be with them forever. Transactional Analysis (TA) is a wonderful tool for this. At The Link Centre we offer a range of services: coaching, counselling, psychotherapy, training etc.

A great course we offer is the 2 day introductory course to TA which is open to anyone who is interested. TA can be used in many areas: coaching, counselling, management, parenting, educational, psychotherapy, relationships.

The way we teach it invites participants to look at their own process and people gain a lot from this in terms of their self-awareness as well as giving them skills and knowledge to use in their wider world.

The feedback on this course is always amazing and participants often refer friends and colleagues and sometimes family to come on it.

We keep the cost low to make it as accessible as possible and the groups are not bigger than 14 in order for people to get maximum benefit – find out more on our website www.thelinkcentre.co.uk

We often consider our health in terms of our body, eating well, exercises, getting enough sleep, but we often focus less on our brain and yet this part of us determines so much about who we are, how we live and the quality of our life.

These are my random ramblings of today; tomorrow I may disagree with myself
Leilani Mitchell