Peripheral Nerve Injury

Live Your Life on Purpose:

Why Life Coaching & Self-Guided Neuro-Plasticity Can Help You Shine

By Tiffany Chion

Last month we looked at why making positive changes in our lives can be challenging, and how getting a little help from a personal coach can be the boost we need. This month, we explore how coaching and self-guided neuroplasticity can literally reshape our brain structure, dramatically altering our experience of life and the world around us.

I want to make changes in my life, but why not do it alone—why use a lifecoach? In recent years, neuroscientists made a great discovery: “Indeed, adults can learn!” It sounds funny, but it was previously thought that adults had a low capacity to change and remodel their brains (i.e., “An old dog can’t learn new tricks”). Recent discoveries based on new imaging technology revealed that adult brains are much more plastic, that is, capable of changing from experience, than previously thought. The challenge, then, is to figure out how to deliberately use this plasticity to remodel how we think and feel, so we can liberate ourselves from fear and doubt and let ourselves shine. As it turns out, neuroscientists are fans of life coaching as a way of remodeling our brains: “Coaching is…a way of facilitating self-directed neuro-plasticity,” (neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz, 2007).

When we encounter a speed bump on the road of life, an internal debate occurs between two regions of our brains. On one side, we have the frontal cortex, which is the brain region where pragmatic thought processes take place. On the other side, we have the amygdala, which is where habitual emotional responses (such as anger, fear, panic, and pessimism) are rooted. Unfortunately, for many of us, the amygdala frequently comes out the winner, which can have psychological/neurological effects ranging from making us feel helpless or anxious, to a full on “fight or flight” panic. These habitual responses have roots in both our individual natures and environment in which we were nurtured, so they are understandable, yet they can also be very detrimental to our overall wellbeing. More often than not, the triggering situation really calls for emotional balance, not a “knee jerk” reaction. to maintain our emotional balance, what we really need is an EXTRA BIG dose of frontal cortex pragmatism, which is critical for interrupting the habitual emotional responses that are triggered automatically by the amygdala. Because of the amygdala’s ability to hijack the pragmatic thought processes of the frontal cortex, having a coach can be like having a second frontal cortex as backup, to keep perspective when your primary one can’t! Coaching can help you become aware of the ways in which you behave reactively, and then help you create space between “you” and “the habit”. This newfound space gives you breathing room (both literal and metaphorical), and allows you to substitute new behaviors for old ones, bringing a sense of control over your destiny and an ability to deliberately shape your feelings and life!

Engaged people leading purposeful lives can have a big impact on their loved ones and the world at large. But sometimes long-standing habits can stand in our way. Habits aren’t so easy to change. According to neuroscientists, through a lifetime of use our habits have carved a deeply ingrained “groove” in our synaptic pathways. As we age this groove becomes deeper and deeper. Unless we take deliberate action to fill and smooth this thought groove, through coaching or counseling, we will remain unable to experiment with new ways to think and live.

Having a coach on your side will help with structuring new ways to think, ways to be, ways to act, and ways to achieve goals that seemed out of reach previously. Having a coach can help you to make educated decisions (from the frontal cortex) that serve your highest purpose, instead of involuntary responses (from the amygdala) that simply repeat past dysfunctional patterns. It can be very frustrating when we want different outcomes and experiences