Category Archive for Neuroscience/Psychology

I love my clients.

This morning’s session was wonderful. One great idea after another about weight and self-image and inlaws and opportunity and evolution of self and being more accomplished/richer/more privileged than some friends and about being less accomplished/poorer/less privileged than others. About work and managing up and watching people struggle and how to do it all better. About food, hormones, and sleep. About genetics, who we are and aren’t, what we love and don’t love, what works and what doesn’t. How to weave our way through life gracefully. How to have it all: love, money, health, and good work.

My client describes her life and I frame it using everything that I have read and learned and feel. The principles of systems science, evolutionary design, health realization, and simple self care permeate my reasoning. Bela Banathy, Syd Banks, George and Linda Pransky, Len Troncale (We’re waiting for the book!), Thomas Leonard, Robert Kegan, Ellen Langer, Joanna Macy. And the brain science people: Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Patricia Churchland, Francisco Varela, Walter Freeman. And the business and money people: Michael Gerber, Jeffrey Fox, Dale Carnegie, Joe Dominguez/Vicki Robin.

And my client comes back with her insights. As valuable, as metaphorical, and as powerful as any I have heard or read.

My thinking integrates in the process. We both learn. We expand.

Chaos is revealed as growth. Angst signals a need for a shift. Negative reframed as positive expands perspective. New, more constructive responses are revealed. Wisdom comes naturally.

Life in the design space.

Who should be paying whom?

Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain is so right on that it’s embarassing. Just when I think that I’m so unique, I read again about how I’m like every other woman on the planet. And how I have been my whole life.

I’m out of the nurturer/caretaker period when I actually cared what my children were doing and about considering my husband’s needs. Now I’m in a get-away-I’m-busy-and-too-busy-to-take-off-just-because-you-want-to period, hotflashing my way to saving us all, and, as part of the Great Turning, hoping that we can all turn this mess toward something approaching sanity and sustainability.

But it’s all hormones. Half a pill and I can be back to my old self, the warm and fuzzy Lynn, the nesting wife and mother.

And lose this? These power surges, this creativity, this independence, this passion for work?! No way!

Recently over dinner a neighbor said that when we get older, we become more of who we are. I am definitely becoming more of who I am–and even more of who I have not been. I think my husband’s a little freaked by it.

Oh, well. . .He’ll just have to deal with it.

Do you think like a man or a woman? How do you respond to face types? What is your ring to index finger ratio? BBC’s brain sex test shows you how male or female your brain is.
I love self tests and this time I’m okay with average. I operate at 50% on the woman’s side. I’ve always known that I think like a woman–I wrote a relationship book!–but, on the female—>male continuum (more about that some day), I’m not a completely female female. Maybe one reason why the book works?

Where do you stand on the continuum?