Who Are You Meant to Be? (8 page)

Unlike the two quadrants of the emotional brain, the left rational brain is not affected by moment-to-moment feelings and experiences. It observes them from a distance and focuses more on what it thinks about people and situations than what it feels or experiences. This brain can dominate, disavow, or detach us from our emotions and experiences by causing us to think about instead of being involved with what is going on. For example, it can observe the behavior of a crying child in a restaurant and contemplate why the child has to be so noisy. From there, it can go on to think that children should not be allowed in public places because they are disruptive and consider what might be done to make this happen.

The following are the activities that the left rational brain is most efficient and least efficient at. The activities describe the function of the brain and what this looks like in the outer world, being acted out by the Leader, and in the inner world, by the Intellectual.

Leader

Intellectual

Right Rational Brain
(Performer, Visionary)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

—Albert Einstein

The goal or purpose of the right rational brain is to imagine, conceptualize, and synthesize information and experiences. It produces awareness of what is possible by processing and integrating information and experiences, and then synthesizing them into a clear and cohesive concept or a vision for the future. It is with this part of the brain that we develop foresight and the ability to imagine a future different from our present. Our right rational brain envisions the world the way we desire it to be and formulates ideas about how to bring the vision to life. This part of the brain processes things as a whole and can leap from point A to conclusion D without feeling the need to collect any facts, or even to visit point B or C along the way. It is strongly intuitive and perceptive; it knows without knowing why. It sees the big picture and gets excited about the possibility of making it real.

The right rational brain is optimistic and hopeful, so it can help us to see our way out of difficult situations and to approach new activities with a fresh, open-minded attitude. It helps us create mental order out of seemingly random thoughts, impressions, and experiences. Using indiscriminate pieces of information, it intuitively knows how to create a cohesive whole. It provides us with the ability to see the potential in things and to view the world as rich with endless possibilities.

While the left rational brain oversees our self-concept, or idea of who we are in the objective sense (e.g., “My name is Tom Hanks; I make my living as an actor; I starred in
Big, Philadelphia Story, Apollo 13
, and many other movies; I went to high school in Oakland, California…”), the right rational brain maintains self-image—the subjective vision of who we are or who we want to be. This self-image is based on the integration of interactions with others over the years and on impressions gathered through reading, the arts, cinema, and so forth. You’ll know the right rational brain is talking when someone says, “I’m the kind of person who…” A well-known actor who shall remain nameless was drawing on her right rational brain when she declared that she was “not the sort of person who slops around in sweatpants.” The image that we have of ourselves determines how we behave, dress, act, and respond to others. A positive self-image leads us to move toward becoming all that we can be. A negative self-image will cause us to stay where we are or move in the opposite direction. Brian Tracy, author and motivational speaker, frequently said in his training sessions that, “Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.”

Self-image is often affected by how we feel or how others feel about us. When country music singer Shania Twain was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, her reaction suggested that her right rational brain was at odds with that honor. She expressed it this way: “I mean why is a girl from Timmins, Ontario, standing here, getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? I really don’t know.” The right rational brain clearly had not, until that time, built a self-image for Twain that was anything like that of the legendary stars whose names line the Walk of Fame, so the honor didn’t seem to align with her self-image. With time and congratulations from many fans and other celebrities, which reinforce their agreement with the honor, she likely has learned to accept it as well.

The more consistent our self-image is with how we actually are, the less we will be affected by negative or corrective feedback from others. So if Lance Armstrong was right about his tendency to learn from difficult experiences, then the next time he is beaten in a race, he will be able to resist becoming demoralized by criticisms that he’s no longer at the top of his career; instead, he will rest assured in his conviction that the loss is an opportunity for some kind of growth.

The following are the activities that the right rational brain is most efficient and least efficient at. They illustrate the function of the brain and what this looks like in the outer world, being acted out by the Performer, and in the inner world, by the Visionary.

Performer

Visionary

Right Emotional Brain
(Socializer, Artist)

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

—Maya Angelou

The goal or purpose of the right emotional brain is to have emotional experiences. It can produce emotions about the present as well as retrieve stored emotionally charged memories from the past. This quadrant decides what value something has or what the intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness of an event, object, or situation is. In other words, it figures out whether we like something or not. It compares and judges what is being experienced and generates feelings about those experiences on the basis of those judgments. Because we are all attracted to and repelled by different things, this subjective valuing is unique to each person. For one person, hearing the song “White Christmas” can activate happy feelings of nostalgia, while for another, it can bring tears of remembered pain and sadness. The right emotional brain doesn’t know why the song makes us happy or sad (although this information may be held elsewhere); it knows only what it feels.

The right emotional brain focuses on present moment experiences as they relate to past emotional memories. For example, if you do something to make me sad, I will connect with myriad memories that have made me sad, which will cause me to accuse you of being just like my mother. This part of the brain seeks to create harmony and is easily pulled off center by emotional conflict. It will focus on restoring harmony by adapting behavior or emotions or by expecting others to adapt theirs during disagreements or in emotional climates. This means that if I’m feeling happy and in my right emotional brain and then I come home to a partner who is angry, I will do what I can to make my partner feel happy or get angry at my partner for wrecking my mood. Whatever the behavior, we will both end up feeling the same.

The holistic nature of this part of the brain doesn’t allow it to separate what is felt from itself, or feeling from fact. Feelings rule; in fact, they are experienced as more important than anything else that is going on. The right emotional brain can use imagination to create scenarios that produce certain feelings so that we can experience those feelings on demand. The actor who can cry on cue, the rebellious teenager who flies into a rage when a younger sibling picks up her diary, and the elderly grandparent who frequently chuckles when talking about old memories are all summoning past experiences or imagined ones to produce a feeling in the present. This quadrant tends to believe something is true because it
feels
that it is true, despite fact-based evidence to the contrary. It fulfills its mandate by re-creating feelings that were experienced in the past. If the past was fulfilling and desirable, this can be a tremendous asset. If it was not, the right emotional brain can continue to create negative emotional experience despite situations being different.

The following are the activities that the right emotional brain is most efficient and least efficient at. They illustrate the function of the brain and what this looks like in the outer world, being acted out by the Socializer, and in the inner world, by the Artist.

Socializer

Artist