Brain Games

The brain is amazing. It can shoot thoughts and feelings in a nana second throughout the body in which you react through a slight movement of the hand, a wink of the eye, a furrowed brow or an instant tear. Wow! I haven’t even touched on speech.

When you hear or read sentences your brain process the information and assigns a meaning and feeling to it based on all the experiences, education, upbringing etcetera you’ve had.

The odd thing is it doesn’t pick up negatives. Isn’t’ that interesting? Why wouldn’t it pick up negatives? Perhaps we’re designed to be positive. Let me give you some examples. When a parent says to their teenager, “Don’t drop the dishes,” the brain only picks up the positive version of the sentence. Therefore, the brain interprets it to mean “Do drop the dishes,” which isn’t the intention of the communication. Of course what happens then is the teenager drops the dishes.  The parent yells at the teenager for not listening, “I told you not to drop them.” A better way to say it would have been, “Be careful with the dishes”.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a sign by a church that said, “Jesus didn’t reject people and neither do we.” Not the message they intended.  A better way to have said it would have been, “Jesus accepts people and so do we”.

The message is this, if people aren’t responding to you perhaps you unintentionally gave a mixed message. You said one thing but the receiver’s brain interpreted it another way. When you clearly state your objective in a positive manner the outcome will be as you intended.

We have so many negatives in our language. Just look back at this post and you’ll see lots of them. It’s a hard habit to break.