I grew up in the church and by my calculation I’ve heard 10,931 church announcements, or thereabouts. I only remember one of them. What did I only remember that one?

Before I give you the answer, I must confess that for me announcements are the most boring part of a service, yet mostly necessary. I’ve felt more stress from having to give them than when I’ve had to speak. I simply hate giving announcements. I guess I don’t like them because I see most people’s eyes glaze over during announcement time.

So why did I just remember the one I referred to?

It happened when I served in California over ten years ago. I took a staycation and visited a few local churches since I didn’t have to attend my church. One church I visited met in a simple warehouse. About ten minutes into the service a man walked on stage with a microphone in one hand and a hotdog in another. He made a couple of announcements between bites. Then another guy walked up on stage with a mike and a hotdog. They began a dialogue about the church hot-dog cookout that followed. I’ll never forget that creative announcement. Even as I write this post I’m getting hungry for a hotdog.

Although these two guys probably didn’t have the brain in mind when they made that announcement, they exemplified a basic rule of attention. The brain pays attention when expectations get violated. I expected the normal talking head to make announcements. But my brain was made more attentive because what I expected didn’t happen.

That simple brain concept not only applies to announcements, but to our sermons as well.

So, if you believe announcements are important and you want people to remember them, violate your congregation’s expectations. Here are a few simple ideas to incorporate into your announcements.

• Novelty (make them from a different location in your auditorium, use video, etc.)
• Surprise (mix up when during the service you make them, have separate people in the congregation stand up and make them, etc.)
• Humor (the key to humor is surprise)
• Object lessons/show and tell (i.e., the hotdog)

What ideas have helped your announcements become more sticky?

“I just learned some creative ways to make announcements more sticky.” (tweet this quote by clicking here) 

Related posts:

• 6 Brain Barriers to Healthy Church Change. 
• Sticky Tips to Church Change

I must confess upfront that I don’t play golf. I’ve only played it once, unless you count dinosaur carpet golf our family often played while on vacation. However, several years ago my father-in-law tried to interest me in the sport. He gave me a set of nice used clubs. But, I never used them. Three years later he asked me how my game was going. Chagrined, I had to admit that I never played with them. He asked me to give them back to him (he really did).

Although I don’t play the game, I know a few key terms such as birdie, bogey, and par. A golfer scores a birdie when he sinks the ball in one less stroke than par. He scores a bogie when he sinks it one stroke over par.

So what do birdies and bogies have to do with leadership?

They provide a compelling visual metaphor for how some leaders miss great opportunities (birdies) because they act like bogey leaders. Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed over 2.5 million putts from the top 20 golfers on the PGA tour in 2007 and made a surprising discovery.[1] Prompted by fear of a ‘bogey,’ these golfers often played it safe in tournaments. Their fear resulted in an average one-stroke loss per 72-hole tournament with a combined annual loss of $1.2 million in potential prize money. “The agony of a bogey seem(ed) to outweigh the thrill of a birdie.”[2]

This dynamic, called loss or risk aversion, occurs when fear of loss stifles our attempts at gain. As a result, that fear can cause us to miss opportunities because we lead (or golf) too conservatively. In fact, our brains seem to be wired this way. Two thirds of the cells in the fight-flight structures of our brain (the amygdala) are wired to look for potential bad news. Personal experience tells us that we tend to more easily remember bad things than good. And we more quickly form bad impressions of others than good ones. Unfortunately, some leaders give in to this tendency too easily and make leadership decisions to avoid loss instead of achieving gain.

So what can a leader do to minimize risk aversion?

I suggest what I call the 3-C approach to minimize it: counsel, certainty, and confidence.

• Counsel: seek it. When you feel you’re about to play it safe when faced with an important decision, seek counsel from wise people. You might choose your staff, your board, a close friend, or a coach. Often input from an objective person can give us what we need to pull the trigger, or not. The writer of Proverbs encourages us to do this. Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success. (Prov 15.22, NLT)

• Certainty: get it. Our brains love certainty.[3] We want to know what lies just around the corner. But often we have no control over the future. Every decision brings with it some uncertainty because we can’t guarantee most outcomes. In response to uncertainty, the flight-fight part of our brain secretes chemicals that prompt the fear emotion, a big de-motivator. That’s where faith must come in. Faith is essentially confidence in the One who is most certain, God Himself. To overcome this fear prompted by the uncertainty of decision-making, we must place our confidence in the one thing we can be sure of, God’s faithfulness. He’ll give us that extra boost of certainty we need to make the decision.

• Courage: live it. Courage counters fear. It doesn’t remove it. When fear rises before a decision, perhaps it’s a sign that we’re on the right track. Mark Twain said it well when he wrote, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. John Wayne, the venerable cowboy of cowboys offers great advice when fear prompts us to avoid a reasonable risk, “Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway.”

So the next time you face a leadership decision and fear attempts to derail you, consider what you could lose if you don’t move forward and saddle up anyway. Don’t bogey your decision. Birdie it instead.

How would you describe most of the leaders you know, bogie or birdie leaders?

Related Posts:

• What do Toilet Repairs and Leadership Have in Common 
• Three Probing Questions Every Leader should Ask Every Year 

You’ve been wrestling with a ministry challenge and you believe you’ve found the right answer. At the next elder meeting you share your idea and one elder begins to voice opposition. Because you feel so strongly that you’re right you begin to raise your voice, talk faster, and talk over others who want to engage in the conversation. Tension escalates. Anger rises. You think, “How dare they think I’m wrong. I know I’m right.”

What happened?

And what should a leader do?

If this has ever happened to you, a small almond shaped structure called the amygdala has hijacked your brain. Located deep inside our brains, it (there are actually two of them) causes our fight-fight-freeze-appease response to danger.

So when you felt threatened from the elder’s pushback, your emotional side took over. And when that happened, the part of our brain that helps you think clearly, respond wisely, and listen carefully, the prefrontal cortex right behind your forehead, got shut down. You reacted emotionally rather than thoughtfully. And when you got too pushy, you probably put the other elder’s brains in the same fight-fight-freeze-appease mode which increased their resistance to your idea.

Unfortunately, many pastors and leaders get stuck in this unhealthy mode. They are driven to be right, to avoid appearing wrong, or to appease others. As a result, too much of the stress hormone, cortisol, courses through their bodies and brains and puts them in a state of chronic stress. Too much cortisol over long periods of time harms our hearts, decreases our creativity and memory, and actually kills brain cells.

When that happens, what can we do?

• Evaluate whether or not you are under chronic stress. If you often feel anxious, react easily, people-please too much, or have difficulty concentrating, your amygdala may be controlling you instead of the Holy Spirit. Your body may be telling you that you need a cortisol break. Ask a close friend or a counselor to help you determine if you’re under chronic stress. Even better, ask him if he feels like always need to be right. Of course, you may not even need anyone to tell you that. You may already know it. A good dose of self-honesty will go a long way toward healing. If you are under chronic stress, create a plan to lessen your stress.

• Remind yourself that God is in control. When the brain experiences uncertainty, (i.e., Will the elders approve my idea?) it feels threatened. When we feel threatened, our emotional side driven by the amygdala tends to take over. Yet, God is the most certain reality in the universe and He tells us to have faith in Him. Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (Heb. 11.1, NIV) Even with the uncertainty that comes with leadership, we can rely on God’s steadfastness certainty and His Spirit can override our human tendency to become fearful when things seem uncertain.

• Learn to listen more empathetically (i.e., when you present your idea to your board). Empathy, being able to step inside another’s shoes, is a key competency for successful pastors and leaders. One study even showed that empathetic doctors got sued less than non-empathetic ones (Ambady, 2002). It doesn’t mean that you don’t hold to your convictions. It does mean, however, that you try to listen with your heart. Empathy, kindness, and caring can actually help activate the trust hormone, oxytocin. When that happens, when others feel that you care and that you really listen, they will endear themselves more to you and to your leadership.

So, if you have to get hooked on something, don’t get hooked on being right about your ideas, but about being right with others and with the Lord.

What do you think? Am I on target with my thoughts?

Here's another great blog posting on the subject by Judith Glasser.

Related Posts:

• Motivate your Teams with These 4 Neuroscience Keys 
• 7 Rules of Conversations that Make for Great Meetings  

References:

Ambady, N. (2002) Surgeons’ tone of voice: A clue to malpractice history. Available from: [Accessed 27 March 2013].

I’m in a 5-part blog series that gives a brain-friendly tip that you can use to make your organizational changes brain-friendly so that they stick. Today’s is Sticky Tip 5: Seed your culture with a change mentality

Seed your culture with a change mentality

Change evokes fear in our emotional centers because it implies threat and the brain is wired to avoid threat and danger. However, the more familiar something becomes to us, the less threatened it will appear to us. So the more you familiarize you team with change, especially before you initiate a major one, the more likely they will receive it. How can you do that?

• First, begin with your leadership. Incorporate a change mentality into your leadership culture so that your core team or influencers don’t see it as a threat. Regularly include conversations about change into staff meetings, retreats, and leadership training. Encourage your leaders to think about it. Make change management a core competency you expect from your staff. Hire staff and recruit key volunteers who aren’t averse to change. Seek to make the concept less foreign.
• Second, include some aspect of change into your annual plans. Make it a core component in every planning cycle, not just when you face significant changes. Keep the conversation about change on the front burner. Help leaders think about ways to stay ahead of change rather than reacting to it when it becomes necessary.
• Finally, if you lead a church or ministry, regularly teach about the Biblical basis of change. Share stories of great heroes of the faith who embraced change and furthered the Kingdom as a result. Abraham obeyed God and moved to a foreign land. God blessed him with a new nation. Ruth left her home, family, and nation to follow Naomi into a strange land. As a result, she became part of the lineage of Jesus. And the disciples gave up their livelihoods to follow Jesus into uncharted waters as the Apostles. They were responsible for spreading the Gospel after Jesus ascended to heaven. Stories move and motivate others to embrace change.

To summarize my last 5 posts, I’ve included the 5 brain-friendly sticky change tips below.

1. Step into their shoes
2. Envision the benefits
3. Manage expectations
4. Invite input
5. Seed your culture with a change mentality

What would you add to this list?

What are you currently doing or what can you do to seed a change mentality into your organization’s culture?

Related Posts:

• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 1
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 2
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 3
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 4

I’m in a 5-part blog series that gives a brain-friendly tip you can use to make your organizational changes brain-friendly so that they stick. Today’s is Sticky Tip 4: Invite input

Invite input

Creating a change buy-in plan infers that you want to help people own the change. Why should they own it? Because people don’t like being told what to do (i.e. “you need to change”). They would rather come up with their own ideas. 

Within reason, provide your team significant opportunities to give input into how the change will look. Give away small components of change to those lower on the leadership org chart. Although upper management and leadership must decide the what of change, providing options and opportunity for your team to fashion the how because the brain loves freedom and autonomy. Allowing others to create components of that change helps create a feeling of autonomy.

Also, give your team real, tangible, and easy channels through which they can give you feedback about the change. Simply knowing that you are serious about listening will decrease your team’s threat response and fear about the change.

What mechanism can you set up to solicit input from your team?

Related Posts:

• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 1
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 2
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 3

I’m in a 5-part blog series that gives a brain-friendly tip that you can use to make your organizational changes brain-friendly so that they stick. Today’s is Sticky Tip 3.

Manage expectations

As you create a change buy-in plan, consider the power of expectations. The brain likes to know what to expect so it can prepare for and anticipate what’s coming. If you team feels uncertain about the future, their anxiety will rise because they get into an away state (a feeling of fear). One way to help moderate this anxiety is to plan how you will set expectations.

It’s wise to set realistic ones and to avoid overselling the benefits. Yet, still build in hopeful expectations. When we expect something good, we get boost of dopamine, the neurotransmitter involved in reward and motivation. 

This process is much like the placebo effect when somebody thinks he’s taking a real drug for a health issue, even though it may be a sugar pill. The sugar pill actually helps some people feel better because their positive expectations activate a part of the brain that tempers pain (Fournier et al., 2010). And, positive expectations prime our brains to be even more receptive. 

David Rock, a noted writer on neuroscience insight wrote, “What you expect is what you experience (Rock, 2009, Kindle e-book loc. 140).” So when you implement the change, you want to have met the expectations you communicated. Better yet, exceed them. Our brains love it when we get something unexpected, like exceeded expectations.

When your team experiences the positive benefits of change, their dopamine levels increase which puts them in a better mood. And when our teams are in better moods, it can engender more confidence in your leadership. They then become even more open to new experiences and change. 

One way to engender this confidence is to recognize and celebrate small wins along the way. The Scriptures even tell us to Rejoice with those who rejoice…. (Rom. 12.15, NIV)

How can you manage expections for the change you hope to bring?

Related Posts:

• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 1
• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 2

References:

Fournier, J.C., DeRubeis, R.J., Hollon, S.D., Dimidjian, S., Amsterdam, J.D., Shelton, R.C. & Fawcett, J. (2010) Antidepressant drug effects and depression severity: a patient-level meta-analysis. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 303 (1), pp.47–53.

Rock, D. (2009) Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. HarperCollins.

I’m in a 5-part blog series that gives brain-friendly tips you can use to make your organizational changes brain-friendly so that they stick. Today’s is Sticky Tip 2.

Envision the benefits

When we imagine accomplishing something it actually activates the same brain circuits as if we actually performed the task (Munzert et al., 2008). As you create your change plan, include ways to help your team envision the positive benefits the change can bring. 

Let’s say you’re moving your office to another location. Plan ways to help your team see how such a move will benefit them. Help them envision how a day in the new office would help them be more productive. Help them imagine what it would be like with new desks, comfortable chairs, a nice break room, and windows. 

Break into manageable bites their fears and concerns you’ve discerned by stepping into their shoes. Address each one. Fill in their knowledge gaps with information that creates a compelling image of the future.

Fill in the gaps with faith that with God’s help you can make the change. If you lead a faith-based ministry or a church, encourage your people with Hebrews 11.1. Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. (NLT)

And, the more you communicate that the change is less about you and your interests and more about their needs, the better your change will stick (Stiff & Mongeau, 2002, p. 111). For example, if you’re trying to create a change in a church, have someone beside the senior leaders share why they believe the change will help the cause of Christ.

Related Post:

• Brain Friendly Sticky Tip 1

In my last post, I suggested 6 brain barriers that limit successful change in churches, ministries, and organizations. Often when leaders plan change for their organization, they simply plan the change itself and neglect planning how to communicate the change. I believe, however, that if you want your change to stick and you want to minimize disruption, you must begin by creating a brain-friendly communication plan.

In my next five blogs, I suggest a brain-friendly tip each day that can help make your change sticky, all grounded in recent neuroscience findings. Here's tip 1.

Step into their shoes

Neuroscientists have learned that often what we say we will do we don’t, and what we say we won’t do, we often do. Of course it doesn't take a brain scientist to figure that out. 

But they’ve discovered that when the part of the brain just behind your eyes lights up, the orbitofrontal cortex (Falk et al., 2010), it can accurately predict future behavior. This part of the brain gives us the ability to see another’s perspective by stepping inside their shoes. It’s called mentalizing. As we think about ourselves or think about others, we engage this part of the brain. And what we do in the future is correlated with it lighting up. So when your team takes your perspective and when you take theirs, you can help move the change forward.

So as you begin to create a buy-in plan, think about how you can step into your team’s shoes. Try to discern their perspective of the pending change by asking yourself questions like these.

• What are their concerns?
• How do they feel about this change?
• What do they fear?
• What do they think is going on inside your head?
• What might be their biggest objections?

Better yet, ask a few key people for their perspective about the change. 

Also, ask yourself how can you create an environment so your team will feel safe to discuss the change. Feeling safe can create a toward response (versus an away or resistant response) which will make your team more open to the change (Whiting et al., 2012).

Related Post:

• 6 Brain Barriers to Healthy Church Change

References:

Falk, E.B., Berkman, E.T., Mann, T., Harrison, B. & Lieberman, M.D. (2010) Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain. The Journal of neuroscience?: the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 30 (25), pp.8421–8424.

Whiting, J., Jones, E., Rock, D. & Bendit, X. (2012) Lead change with the brain in mind. Neuroleadership Journal, (4), pp.1–15.

Healthy change is necessary for any church, ministry, or business to thrive. However, leaders often run into these invisible brain barriers when they attempt change. Ignoring them can slow or stonewall a change. Since neuroscientists are now rapidly learning amazing new insights about the brain, it behooves us to learn about how our brains respond to change.

The next time you plan a change initiative for your church or organization, consider how you might lessen the effects of these brain barriers that can stifle it.

1. Brain Barrier 1: Undoing a bad impression is harder than creating a good one. It’s the “you don’t have a second chance to make a good first impression” adage. Neuroscientists have found that to be true. It’s not just an old wives’ tale (Lount et al., 2008). Poorly introduced change will start your change on the wrong footing.
2. Brain Barrier 2: People initially assume the worst. Your brain is wired to pick up the negative more than the positive. In fact, 2/3 of the brain cells in the flight-fight part of your brain, the amygdala, are wired to pick up on what’s wrong rather than on what’s right (Hanson, 2010). Our brains have a built-in negativity bias. People will initially latch onto potential negatives of your change rather than onto the positives.
3. Brain Barrier 3: The brain can only handle so much change at once. Trying to create too much change too quickly increases the brain’s fear response and will hinder that change (Hemp, 2009).
4. Brain Barrier 4: People will fill in knowledge gaps about your change with fear. Change causes uncertainty about the future which in turn breeds fear. And when the brain senses fear, it doesn’t like it. It will act out of that fear which dampens the brain’s ability to think clearly. The less information you provide about your change initiative, the more others will fill in the knowledge gaps with their negative assumptions. As a result, they’ll be more fearful and more resistant to change.
5. Brain Barrier 5: People underestimate their ability to weather difficult future events (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Uncertainty causes us to poorly forecast how well we can face the difficulties that changes might bring. The term is called “affective forecasting.” When you present change, others will often initially assume that life will be worse for them because of your change.
6. Brain Barrier 6: Emotions play a significant role in decision-making and influence how well others will embrace change. Just presenting facts about your change without engaging positive and hopeful emotions about the future will seldom move it forward.

In my next post I give some brain-friendly keys to change.

What barriers have you seen from others when you’ve introduced change?

Related posts:

• 6 Keys to Mastering Church Change 
• How to Respond When Someone Leaves Your Church 

References:

Hanson, R. (2010) Confronting the Negativity Bias [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-wise-brain/201010/confronting-the-negativity-bias> [Accessed 31 January 2013].

Hemp, P. (2009) Death by Information Overload - Harvard Business Review [Internet]. Available from: <http://hbr.org/2009/09/death-by-information-overload/ar/1> [Accessed 20 March 2013].

Lount, R.B., Zhong, C.-B., Sivanathan, N. & Murnighan, J.K. (2008) Getting Off on the Wrong Foot: The Timing of a Breach and the Restoration of Trust. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (12), pp.1601–1612.

Wilson, T.D. & Gilbert, D.T. (2005) Affective Forecasting. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 (3), pp.131–134.

Diversity in the church is big today. With greater globalization and the desire to melt racial barriers, many pastors want their churches to become ethnically diverse. Many pastors intentionally seek to create such diversity through staffing, who gets on the worship teams, and who becomes the face of the church from the stage or on their web site. 

I laud that desire. I’ve done the same. In the last church I led we included several Latinos on the worship team, and not just for token diversity. They were great worship leaders. And several years ago I hired an African-American to serve as my worship leader. So I believe in diversity. 

However, I many have unintentionally limited my definition of diversity to ethnicity or language and missed one huge area of diversity that already exists in every church: neurodiversity.

What do I mean when I say neurodiversity? Simply this.

Neurodiversity means that people think and process information differently. Not everybody thinks like you or me. I think more linearly, logically, and left brained. As a result, my preaching, leading, staffing, and volunteer selection has tended to reflect my thinking style. I may have unintentionally taught and led without taking into account that God gave us all unique thinking styles. I’m much wiser now and realize that I must take into account neurodiversity when I perform these pastoral functions.

Preaching and teaching: People learn differently and thus process teaching differently depending on their tendency as left-brained or right-brained. Below, I’ve contrasted a few left brained traits on the left with right brained traits on the right (notice how linear I am).

• Process the familiar…process the novel
• Detailed… holistic/big picture
• Sequential…random
• Logical…intuitive

If you want to read a great (and long) book on left brain vs right brain, read The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist.  Also, here’s a great TED video on the divided brain (over a million views). 

Change management: People respond differently to change. Some people’s brain make-up makes them less fearful of change, and thus able adapt to it more quickly. Others perceive change as a huge threat and they dig their heels in to oppose it. (A great article on the 5 Fears of Change here.) 

Encouraging healthy followership: Some will follow you simply because you present a compelling and logical reason to follow. Others  will follow only when you move them emotionally.

Teams: If everybody on your team thinks like you, you can foster groupthink, when a team gets along so well or agrees so readily that nobody challenges ideas or the status quo. As a result, you can miss opportunities or even make poor choices. Susan Cain, author of one of the best books I’ve read in the past two years, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, talks about groupthink in this great article. 

Every pastor who wants to move his church forward for Kingdom purposes should certainly seek to remove ethnic barriers to allow that church to be as diverse as God intends for it to become. 

However, those in your church are already significantly diverse in one significant domain, neurodiversity. As you lead, teach, and develop others, heed and adapt to their diverse thinking and mental processing styles. You’ll become a more effective Kingdom leader.

Is this a new concept for you? How can you apply it to your church setting? 

Related posts:

• 6 Tips to Help Others Discover Their Spiritual Gifts 
• The Hidden Factor that Hinders Church Change 

In your church you’re probably trying to bring change in some way or are contemplating it. Unfortunately, change in our churches often doesn’t go so well. In fact, we’re not alone. In the business world some have estimating that the majority of organizational change either fails, underperforms, or makes things worse (Cope, 2003). I imagine that church change doesn't fare much better.

However, we don't have to become a statistic. Consider 8 these insights the next time you try to bring change to your church, ministry, or organization.

1. Incorporate a change mentality into your church culture so that people don’t see it as a threat. The more you talk about, the less scary it becomes when it happens.
2. Include change as a component in the church’s current strategy. When you create your annual goals and strategies, include a clearly defined component of change. Do this every year. Don't make it a sporadic communication.
3. Regularly teach on the Biblical basis of personal change so that change is more easily embraced. When training leaders, always include some component that teaches about change. Try to build change management into key staff and volunteers as a core competency.
4. Help key players (staff, key volunteers, and church boards) embrace a philosophy of healthy change (see above). Seek to hire staff and recruit volunteers who aren’t change averse. When you recruit others, be sure to discuss their view about change and your expectations about it.
5. Build forward thinking into the highest levels of your leadership conversations. Help leaders think about ways they can stay ahead of the change curve in culture rather than reacting to it when it inevitably comes.
6. Involve as many people as reasonably possible into change initiatives. Give away small to medium-sized components of change to those lower on the leadership org chart. Get ownership as much as possible.
7. Celebrate wins, both short and long-term ones. You can’t overdo this one.
8. Reduce internal threat levels through building healthy relationships and a brain friendly working environment. Read this article that talks about what a brain friendly environment looks like. It’s based on the latest neuroscience research. The model is called SCARF an incredibly insightful way to build team collaboration and productivity.

What has helped you create change in your ministry or business?

Related posts:

• Is this the hidden factor that hinders change in your church?
• How the Brain Stifles Church Change

References:

Cope, M. (2003) The Seven Cs of Consulting [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/355030.The_Seven_Cs_of_Consulting> [Accessed 2 March 2013].

I’m a pastor and I’m intrigued with how God created our brains for effective communication and healthy team dynamics.

Recently I started a small side business called BullsEyeAnimations  to create ‘white board’ animations for companies that want to communicate difficult concepts, train employees, or market their products.

I manage the process, create the script, and do the voiceover for the animation (done by an animator). I recently spent a half-day with four members of a company that had hired us to create a three-minute animation to explain a very complicated proprietary brokerage service they offer.

I used several neuroscience techniques in that meeting that you might try the next time you lead a brainstorming session.

• To help set up the day I created a clear agenda and emailed it several days prior to the meeting. This is called pre-encoding. Encoding is the process of learning when our brain lays down new networks of neuronal connections. Pre-encoding, as the word implies, sets up the brain to receive that learning (the actual encoding). The agenda clearly articulated the meeting’s objectives and set us up for greater productivity. When we met, we knew exactly what we wanted the brainstorming session to accomplish. Here’s what it included.
• Who: Clarify the target audience for the animation and the audience’s felt needs
• What: Clarify the call to action the animation should evoke
• How: Create a rough draft of the script and brainstorm potential visual concepts that could illustrate the message

• I began the session by sharing a bit about my life to create a relational connection (two in the group were total strangers). When people feel they relate to you, they will follow your leadership and more readily learn from you. The early church understood this when they met house to house and built strong relational bonds through Biblical community (Acts 2.42). 

• I gave everybody a chocolate bar and explained that chocolate can aid focus and creativity by causing helpful neurotransmitters in our brains to release (Roizman, n.d.). Not only did I provide brain fuel with the candy, but I also heightened expectations that the session would result in lots of ideas. The brain needs both oxygen and glucose (energy) to function well. While too much sugar can certainly cause a brain lag later on, providing chocolate, coffee, or healthy snacks can help the brain function optimally.

• During the meeting we needed to generate personality traits to describe the target audience (the broker), list potential metaphors to use in the animation, and create a basic script. Instead of using the traditional brainstorming technique where everybody shares their ideas out loud, I asked each person to first privately write down their ideas. Then they shared them out loud and I recorded them on the white board after which we eliminated the ones that didn’t fit. Traditional brainstorming, where everybody verbalizes their ideas at the beginning, has been shown to not generate as many ideas as when people are asked to generate them privately (Lehrer, 2012). So, the simple act of having then jot down their ideas privately encouraged more idea generation.

• During our discussion time I subtly encouraged dissent and disagreement about the ideas, contrary to traditional brainstorming (get all the ideas out without criticizing any of them). Neuroscientists have found that dissent, when done in a “non-threatening to status” way, actually increases creativity (Nemeth et al., 2004).

The next time you lead a staff brainstorming session include a few of these five ingredients in your meeting and see what happens.

1. Healthy dissent to prompt creative thinking.
2. Private idea generation before public discussion.
3. Food such as chocolate or coffee to get the brain focused and alert.
4. Relationship building to engender likeability among the team.
5. A clear agenda to pre-encode what you want to accomplish.

What have you found that has helped make brainstorming more productive?

Related Posts:

• 6 Ways to Add Interest to Your Meetings  
• 7 Conversation Rules that Make for Smoother Staff Meetings

Sources:

Lehrer, J. (2012) Groupthink. The New Yorker. Available from: <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer> [Accessed 25 February 2013].

Nemeth, C.J., Personnaz, B., Personnaz, M. & Goncalo, J.A. (2004) The liberating role of conflict in group creativity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, pp.365–374.

Roizman, T. Chocolate & Dopamine [Internet]. Available from: <http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/chocolate-dopamine-3660.html> [Accessed 23 February 2013].

Almost every year in my 32 years in ministry I’ve spent multiple hours preparing and delivering multiple staff performance reviews. I was shocked to recently learn that I may have been wasting my time.

In a meta-study (a study of the studies) researchers discovered that only 30% of feedback and performance reviews actually helped (Kluger & DeNisi,1996). They discovered that 30% have no impact and 40% actually make things worse, not a very good track record.

I wonder how many of us pastoral leaders would agree with those statistics? 

Does that mean we should drop performance reviews? 

No, not at all. Every leader can improve the performance review process through being more intentional with these these 7 C’s. When a review process includes these factors, neuroscience research indicates that real change can occur.

I’ve divided the 7 C's into these two categories.

1. The person: issues that directly relate to the person who’s receiving the review and the reviewer as well.
2. The process: issues that directly relate to the process itself.

The Person

• Community: Make sure that the person receiving the review feels emotionally connected to you as much as possible. Try to build a sense of community with those you review (Ibarra, 1999).
• Coachability: Before the review, help your staff develop a coaching/learner mentality. Help them see the value of feedback and reviews. The more value they see, the more positively they will receive it (Atwater & Brett, 2005).
• Connected: Help the staff person connect the feedback she receives to how she sees herself in the future (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996) and to her larger goals (Ashford et al., 2003).

The Process

• Credible: Make sure you as the supervisor are unbiased and fully informed about the staff person’s job and performance before doing the review (Waldman et al., 1998).
• Coupled: This is key. You must couple the review to follow up, ideally through a coaching process. Build into the process action steps to address areas that need improvement, all with a developmental rather than a punitive tone. Also, couple the process to a teaching session before the review to help staff understand the review process and how to get the best from it.
• Consistent: Make sure that the process elicits consistent feedback from all sources (Ashford et al., 2003).
• Collaborative: The more collaborative the process, the more effective it will be. If possible include peers, reports, and supervisors in the process. (London & Smither, 1995).

Include some of these ideas the next time you do a staff review and see how it helps. 

If you'd like to get a copy of a self-evaluation tool I’ve used, email me here. I give it to the staff person I'm to review and ask them to fill it out first. After they complete it and I’ve reviewed it, then we meet for the review.

What have you discovered that has helped your reviews actually improve performance?

 Related posts

• Staff Performance Reviews: do they help or hinder?
• 360-Degree Performance Assessments, a valuable tool

Sources:

Ashford, S.J., Blatt, R. & VadeWalle, D. (2003) Reflections on the Looking Glass: A Review of Research on Feedback-Seeking Behavior in Organizations. Journal of Management, 29 (6), pp.773–799.

Atwater, L.E. & Brett, J.F. (2005) Antecedents and consequences of reactions to developmental 360° feedback. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 66 (3), pp.532–548.

Ibarra, H. (1999) Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (4), pp.764–791.

Kluger, A.N. & DeNisi, A. (1996) The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996) [Internet]. Available from: [Accessed 2 February 2013].

London, M. & Smither, J.W. (1995) Can Multi-Source Feedback Change Perceptions of Goal Accomplishment, Self-Evaluations, and Performance-Related Outcomes? Theory-Based Applications and Directions for Research. Personnel Psychology, 48 (4), pp.803–839.

Waldman, D.A., Atwater, L.E. & Antonioni, D. (1998) Has 360 Degree Feedback Gone Amok? The Academy of Managaement Executive, 12 (2).

The phrase “cotton candy preaching” is a derogatory term that implies sermons lack depth. And of course no pastor wants to be considered a “cotton candy preacher.” On the other hand I’ve heard pastors say that Christians need “meat and potatoes” preaching which they define as sermons with depth. Such pastors often begin their sermons with, “Please turn in your Bibles to today’s text.” Once they read the Scripture, they’re off to the races to give a deep, theological sermon, a meat and potatoes kind.

But after spending 15-20 hours per week preparing a sermon, how do we really know if it connected with the listener? Is the test of a good sermon simply that we delivered a deep, theological, sound talk? Is it all about good content? Is it up to the listener to get it and figure out how it applies to his or her life? Or is this the true test of a great sermon: that we truly connect to the listener’s heart and mind so that the Holy Spirit changes attitudes and behaviors?

I think it’s the latter. That’s where cotton candy preaching comes in.

In my current masters program I’m completing on the neuroscience of leadership, also called neuroleadership, I’m learning how important the brain plays in persuading others to change. In my 32 years in ministry I’ve faced my share of critics. Some have said that my sermons were too heady and that they didn’t connect with the heart. I’ve been puzzled why I seemed to get those comments. Now I understand why.

The old sage Aristotle helped us when he described three domains that affect persuasion (and preaching).

1. Logos: persuasion through reasoning and logic.
2. Pathos: persuasion by appealing to emotions.
3. Ethos: persuasion through the force of character or personality of the speaker or writer.

People in your congregation are largely persuaded through these factors. Either reasoning or emotion moves them. I tend to be more of a thinker, so I’m persuaded more by thoughtful, reasoned sermons rather than ones that I might classify as cotton candy. I’ve tended to be more of a meat and potatoes preacher. But I’m in the minority because emotions persuade many more people than does logic. Think about TV commercials. Most commercials don’t list the benefits of their products. They tell a story or evoke emotion or move the heart. Dodge Ram’s God Made a Farmer  commercial in this year’s super bowl with Paul Harvey beautifully illustrates how emotion moves the heart. I tear up every time I watch the commercial, yet it does not lack depth.

I had received those criticisms I just mentioned because I had crafted my sermons to avoid being pegged a cotton candy preacher. But I now realize that for any meat and potatoes sermon to stick, we must incorporate some cotton candy techniques, those that we may think don’t contribute much to a message’s depth.

Consider these cotton candy preaching ideas the next time you prepare and deliver a sermon.

• Remember that because most of the people in your congregation came from hectic and difficult weeks, they aren’t in a mindset to listen to you. It’s your job to help them get ready, along with the other elements of the service.
• During the week live a life of integrity and authenticity. Love people and spend time with them so that your ethos works on your behalf. People must believe you are a credible person before they will believe you have a credible message.
• Start your message with pathos and then move to logos. Use emotion, within reason, because it grabs attention. Remember, nothing is learned that is not paid attention to.
• Use novelty. The brain loves novelty (Eide, 2006). Start, illustrate, and deliver your sermons creatively. Don’t become so predictable that people can guess what you’re going to do next.
• Use humor. Humor makes people feel good and when they feel good they learn more.
• Make sure you provide lots of application. Neuroscience tells us that self-referent information (that which we can apply to ourselves) is more easily learned and retained (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). After all, we teach and preach so that God can take His Word to change people’s lives.
• Keep your messages simple. Less is often more.

What cotton candy ideas have worked in your preaching?

Related posts:

• Are Your Sermons Hard or Easy to Listen to?
• 5 Ways to Get People to Pay Attention to Your Sermons 

Eide, D.F.A.B. (2006) Eide Neurolearning Blog: Shake Things Up - Novelty Boosts Learning. Eide Neurolearning Blog. Available from: <http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/shake-things-up-novelty-boosts.html> [Accessed 8 June 2012].

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977) Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (35), pp. 677-688.

Motivating staff and volunteers in your church is often as elusive as nailing Jell-O to a tree. Yet to move our churches from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ we must motivate those around us. Often pastors use the same ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach the marketplace has used for decades. If you do such-and-such you will receive a reward (salary increase, pat on the back, etc). If you don’t, you’ll get something negative: you won’t receive the reward, you will have to step down, etc. We’re now learning that this approach does not work in the long term.

However, neuroscience is discovering effective ways to motivate others based on how our brains work. Consider putting these four brain-based ideas into your motivation toolbox.

1. Build interpersonal likeability among team members.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but neuroscientists have discovered a brain-based reason to help your team like each other more. Performance increases when co-workers like each other (Shteynberg & Galinsky, 2011).

• Leadership application: regularly use team building and social experiences to build common interests and community among your staff, board, and volunteers. 

2. Encourage sharing of mistakes.

We all learn through our mistakes. However, some church environments discourage sharing them. We don’t want to look like failures. However, brain studies have discovered that when we observe how a friend (see point 1 above about likeability) learned from his mistake, we learn from it, just as if we ourselves made the same mistake. At the same time we are more open to receiving feedback about our mistakes from our friends (Kang et al., 2010). So the greater community you build, the more easily your team will learn from each other and receive feedback. Such relationships foster a “your mistakes are my mistakes” attitude. As Prov. 27.6 says, Wounds from a friend can be trusted….

• Leadership application: set an example by sharing your mistakes and what you are learning from them and create an environment that makes it safe for others to share theirs.

3. Repeat the common "why" often and delegate the "how."

Leaders must constantly seek answers to two key questions: “Why are we doing what we are doing?” and “How do we do it?” A common why (a shared goal: being on the same page), helps churches avoid silos and those same shared goals actually increase personal productivity (Shteynberg & Galinsky, 2011). Pastors should prioritize vision clarity as one of their top three roles, along with leadership development and teaching. When you pair a clear and shared why along with allowing your team to create the how, you will foster an atmosphere of personal freedom and autonomy, a key component for high performing teams (Rock, David & Cox, n.d.).

• Leadership implication: Stay focused on keeping the why clear and allow staff and volunteers to develop the how.

4. Communicate using personality specific language.

Our brains process motivation in different ways. One study about motivating people to floss their teeth discovered that different sides of the brain light up in a scanner depending on how the message was communicated (Sherman et al., 2006). If a person is more motivated to avoid certain negative things (i.e., floss to avoid bad breath), avoidance type messages motivated them to floss more often. For those motivated more by an approach personality, (if I do such-and-such I will get something good: floss to get great breath), approach messages motivated them to floss more often.

• Leadership implication: know your team well enough so you can tailor your messages to match personalities either as avoidance ones or as approach ones.

What has worked well to motivate your team?

Related posts

• 5 Ways to Motivate Others you May have Skipped
• What Motivates People’s Brains to be Generous? It Might Surprise You.
• Not Motivated? Try a Simple Pleasure

If you want your church to thrive you can’t avoid church change. Yet it is seldom easy, even though we leaders see the benefits of change before others see them. One hidden reason that makes it so difficult comes from how our brains respond to change. I believe that the more we know how the brain works, the more effective change managers we’ll become.

In a prior blog about the brain’s influence on change I wrote… 

Our brains are wired for us to want certainty in our lives. When something feels ambiguous or uncertain, we subconsciously feel threatened. When we feel threatened, it creates an away response, rather than a toward response. In the case of church change, an away response might be negativity, fear, passive resistance, or complaining from people. On the other hand, a toward response would be excitement, support, and good gossip, how we hope the church would respond. The more uncertain and ambiguous church change appears, the less support we’ll get and the more difficult the change will become.

Ambiguity about changes we propose, plus many other brain factors, influence how well people in your church will respond to your leadership. I know of one church in the south that is preparing for significant change by attempting to raise several million dollars for a building renovation. However, several key players and church members have yet to embrace the plan. The resistance to the change rises from these core issues.

• Fear that this fund raising effort will hinder other fundraisers that several ministries depend on.
• Sparse information given to the church before key milestones in the process.
• Resistance by some about going into debt.
• Older church members who feel uncomfortable with the change.

Based on brain insights, I’ve listed five ways that this church or any church should consider to best manage such change.

1. Leaders should first understand that two fundamental brain systems are at play in the people they seek to lead. One process, called the "X-system," got its name from the ‘x’ from the word reflexive. This system is more emotional, reactive, habitual, impulsive, spontaneous, and fast. It’s the non-thinking, automatic process that most people live by day-to-day. It’s what prompts someone to emotionally react to a change. The other process, called the "C-system," comes from the ‘c’ in reflective.  It’s more intentional, controlled, slower, and causes us to think before we speak or act. This system prompts people to reflectively consider the change. Simply knowing how the brains of your people work can help you manage change better. If you want to learn more about these processes, read, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
2. Recognize that change can create an away response in our brains and our emotions (see the quote above). If we feel threatened and fearful (caused by an away response), we’re less likely to embrace change. Older church members may feel especially threatened due both to the effects of age on the brain and to their long term ingrained church habits that aren’t easily changed (Williams et al., 2008). Therefore, leadership should publically acknowledge that they understand that change is difficult and scary and that it's scary for them as leaders as well.
3. Bring key players into the conversation. If key players believe they’ve been excluded from the process they can feel that they are in the “out” group. When they do, resistance to change will be higher because it also creates an away response in the brain (Rock, David & Cox, n.d.).
4. Over communicate using all means possible. The more information church people receive, the less ambiguity and more certainty they will feel. As a result, they will be less tempted to fill in the information gaps with worst case scenarios and will become more open to the reasons you give for the change.
5. Finally, seek to minimize something called cognitive dissidence. This term simply describes the inner tension we feel when our belief conflicts with our behavior (i.e., I want to lose weight but I’m eating a bag of Cheetos). Cognitive dissonance creates anxiety that can make us less open to change. One way to help minimize it is to preach and teach to change people’s beliefs about the change you’re proposing. If you can help them agree that the reason for the change is Biblical (i.e., reach more people), you can help them shift their behavior to align more with the change (i.e., their willingness to sacrifice convenient parking during the renovation). Behavior change follows change in belief.

God has given us this incredible thing called the brain. The more we learn how it works, the better leaders and change agents we will become.

What insights about change have helped you in your ministry or job?

Related posts:

• 6 Keys to Mastering Change in the Church  
• Is this the Hidden Factor Hindering Change in your Church 

Sources:

Rock, David & Cox, C. SCARF in 2012: updating the social neuroscience of collaborating with others. Neuroleadership Journal, (four).

Williams, L.M., Gatt, J.M., Hatch, A., Palmer, D.M., Nagy, M., Rennie, C., Cooper, N.J., Morris, C., Grieve, S., Dobson-Stone, C., Schofield, P., Clark, C.R., Gordon, E., Arns, M. & Paul, R.H. (2008) THE INTEGRATE MODEL OF EMOTION, THINKING AND SELF REGULATION: AN APPLICATION TO THE ‘PARADOX OF AGING’. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 07 (03), pp.367–404.

Here's a list of my top 10 blog posts for 2012.

1. Should Pasors Abstain from Driniking Alcohol
2. What Snorkeling Taught me about Selecting Leaders
3. Are you a Transformational or a Transactional Leader-take this test and ifnd out
4. Are you a Brain Savvy Pastor or Still in Pre-School?

5. Is This the Number 1 Reasons Leaders Fail?
6. Is This the HIdden Factor that Hinders Change in Your Church?
7. 5 Ways to Motivate Others You may Have Skipped.
8. 360 Degree Assessments-an Invaluable Tool for Leadership Growth
9. 6 Tips to Keeping a New Year's Resolution
10. Brain Based Preaching: New Age Voodoo or the Missing Link?

Why does it seem so hard to bring change in a church?

In my 30 plus years in ministry, change management has been one of the most challenging tasks I’ve faced. Most pastors would probably agree. Recently I learned an insight about how people’s brains work that helped me see what I may have unintentionally overlooked when I initiated a change.

Our brains are wired for us to want certainty in our lives. When something feels ambiguous or uncertain, we subconsciously feel threatened. When we feel threatened, it creates an away response, rather than a toward response. In the case of church change, an away response might be negativity, fear, passive resistance, or complaining from people. On the other hand, a toward response could be excitement, support, and good gossip, how we hope the church would respond. The more uncertain and ambiguous church change appears, the less support we’ll get and the more difficult the change will become.

So how we can we make church change less ambiguous and easier to bring about? I’ve listed some pointers below based on some recent findings in neuroscience.

1. Stay close to your key influencers during the entire change process. Remember, the more threatened someone feels, the more they will resist change. Learn their unique personalities because some personalities respond better to change than others. (Brin Jr. & Hoff, 1957).
2. Remain sensitive to characteristics that impact a person’s feeling of threat caused by the uncertainty change brings.
   • The more politically conservative they are, the more they may feel threatened by change (Jost et al., 2008).
   • The more personal anxiety they’re experiencing, the more threatened they may feel from change (Bishop, 2007).
   • The lower a person’s self esteem, the more resistant they can be to change (Ford & Collins, 2010).
3. Keep people informed with timely reports on how the change is progressing (helps minimize uncertainty).
4. Cast a compelling vision on how the new change can make things better (a form of reframing current reality).
5. Teach about characters in the bible who created certainty through faith, believing God was in control despite difficult circumstances and uncertain futures.
6. Teach about how to keep a healthy Christ centered self-esteem.
7. Teach on how to biblically manage anxiety—see blog

What are some tips you’ve learned that have helped bring change?

Related Posts:

• 6 Keys to Managing Church Change
• The Brain and Successful Church Change 

References:

Bishop, S. (2007) Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Anxiety: and Integrative Account. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, xxx (x), pp.1–10.

Brin Jr., O. & Hoff, D. (1957) Individual and Situational Differences in Desire for Certainty. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 54(2), pp.225–229.

Ford, M.B. & Collins, N.L. (2010) Self-esteem Moderates Neuroendoctrine and Psychological Responses to Interpersonal Rejection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98 (3), pp.405–419.

Jost, J.T., Nosek, B.A. & Gosling, S.D. (2008) Ideology: Its Resurgence in Social, Personality, and Political Psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 (2), pp.126–136.

Every week in the U.S., pastors preach upwards of 400,000 sermons. That excludes Bible studies taught by hundreds of thousands of Sunday school teachers and small group leaders.

I’ve delivered in excess of 1,500 sermons and bible studies myself. But what difference have they made in people’s lives? I suppose I won’t really know until I get to heaven.

In the meantime, however, I believe I should learn everything I can to make my teaching and preaching stickier.

And nothing sticks unless those who listen to us engage their brains.

Unfortunately, though, most pastors seldom consider how brain processes influence learning. It’s a missing link in today’s preaching and teaching. I believe it would behoove every pastor to learn how God made our brain and how it affects learning.

In the last 20 years we’ve learned amazing new insights about how God created our brain and how it’s involved in learning. With the advent of the functional MRI (fMRI), scientists can see what brain neighborhoods activate when we think certain things, pay attention, learn, and feel emotion. These new insights can pay great dividends to pastors who learn about the brain.

I recently participated in a webinar sponsored by the Neuroleadership Institute and ASTD on the brain (click the link to download some cool papers). In one word, fascinating.

Dr. Grace Chang, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., presented the first session on making learning sticky. She began by defining one of the two types of memory, declarative memory. Non-declarative memory is the other kind (think riding a bike, you can’t describe how you do it, you just do it). Declarative memory, in our context, would be the kind we would want to foster when we teach. We want our listeners to be able to consciously recall the Biblical content of our sermons so that the Holy Spirit can take that truth and transform their beliefs and behavior.

Dr. Chang said that three main brain processes compose declarative memory.

1. Acquire the information (getting it in called encoding). An example would be what you do to get your sermon into the minds of your listeners (i.e., the spoken sermon itself, visuals you use, dramas to reinforce the point).
2. Retain the information (keeping it in called storing). This happens when your listeners actually remember what you said instead of forgetting it when they walk out of the church.
3. Retrieve the information (using it called accessing). This is simply application. You want your listeners not only to remember what you said, but to apply the truth in their daily lives as well.

So, is brain-based preaching new age voodoo?

Not at all.

Brain-based preaching is an intentional process by which you consider how people’s brains process information and learn. When we keep the brain in mind and in particular these three memory processes, I believe our sermons will become sticker and result in greater life transformation.

If you want to read a great article on brain-based learning, I recommend this one.

Next week when you finalize your sermon, take five minutes and ask yourself what you could do to incorporate each of these three brain processes in your sermon to make it sticker.

In fact, don’t wait until next week. What is one small brain-based change that immediately comes to your mind right now that could make this week’s sermon stickier?

Related posts:

• Sticky Sermons: How Brain Insights can Improve Them
• Are your Sermons Hard or Easy to Listen to?

In 1990 the U.S. government declared the next decade as the “Decade of the Brain” to foster more research about the brain. Since that time we’ve learned incredible new insight about how the brain and our minds affect life and leadership.

Pastors and other ministry leader would do their ministries well to incorporate learning about the brain into their leadership development and growth. Research has discovered that subtle processes in our brains impact teamwork, emotional regulation, motivation, and communication.  The new term “neuroleadership” describes this emerging field.

I’m fully convinced that the more we learn about this incredible God created gift called the brain and about how our minds work, the better leaders we’ll become.

I’ve listed eight biblical foundations that support learning about our brain and its function. I’ve also written several blogs on this subject. You can click here to read them.

1. References to the mind/thinking fill the Scriptures (over 120 times).

• Is. 26.3 You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.
• Proverbs 23:7  As a man thinks so he is . . .
• Rom. 8:6… the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace;
• Col. 3:2   Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

2. Since the brain is part of the body, we must honor God with our brains.

• 1Cor. 6.19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

3. The bible links the working of the mind with the working of the Holy Spirit and our spirits (I Cor. 2).

4. God commands us to remember (over 175 time). Remembering is an important function of our minds.

5. We are to strive for an undivided heart and mind.

• Psa. 86.11…give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.
• James 1.8 …he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

6. The bible commands us to renew our minds so that we can live transformed lives.

• Rom. 12:2   Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

7. The bible instructs us to think a certain way because what we think about profoundly impacts behavior. 

• Phil. 4.8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things. 

8. Jesus wants us to love him with our entire being, including our minds.

• Matt. 22.37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

If you’d like to read a great primer on the brain with many applications to leadership, I recommend a secular one called, Your Brain At Work, by Dr. David Rock. I'm currently writing a book for IVP that will release late 2013 or early 2014 that will incorporate some of these new insights.

What insights about the brain have helped you lead better? 

I believe my leadership calling is to bring insight about the incredible gift from God called the brain into conversations about Christian leadership. So, many of my blog posts reflect this bent from my current learning. Since we’re to honor God with our bodies (1 Cor. 6.20) and the brain is part of our body, we need to honor God with our brains. Learning how they work is one way to do that.

In this blog I point out that two significant processes in our brains influence generosity: the sense of reward we personally experience when we give and the empathy we feel toward the recipient of our gifts.

I grew up in the church and I tithed even before I was a Christian. I go beyond a tithe because the bible says I’m supposed to be generous. We certainly must preach and teach about generosity, but we also must recognize how people make decisions. Emotions are a vital part of our decision making. In fact, neuroscientists are discovering that people whose emotional centers of their brains are damaged (called lesions) can’t make wise decisions. Often they lack discretion because they can’t emotionally connect that a decision could bring a bad outcome. So, it makes sense that we pastors have some sense of how the brain works.

I’d like to think that Christians give solely from obedience, not on the basis of a reward they will get. They don’t. People give partially because it makes them feel good and gives them a sense of satisfaction. I believe that in many cases, such giving is biblically justified because the bible often speaks about serving God for reward. In fact, when people give, it increases a neurotransmitter in their brains, dopamine, that makes them feel good.

Secondly, neuroscientists have discovered that a key component that increases giving lies in the degree the giver empathizes with the recipient of the gift. If their hearts are touched and they feel empathetically drawn to the need, they usually give more frequently and more generously.

So, in light of what we know about the brain and generosity, I suggest four simple ideas to incorporate into your stewardship plans.

1. Put a tangible face on giving to increase empathy. Certainly provide budgets, but translate those dollar figures into tangible, heartfelt needs. For example, I’ve sometimes explained that giving helps us do even the small things like buying pampers for the nursery.
2. Tell stories to connect with people’s hearts (empathy). When I’ve promoted giving we’ve often told stories how their giving has changed someone’s life.
3. Regularly report financial status to build trust. Trust builds favor and connects with the brain’s sense of fairness. Use clear, concise, and frequent reporting to keep people in the know.
4. Appeal to personal satisfaction to connect with the reward motivation. Share biblical stories that model how when bible characters gave sacrificially, they experienced personal pleasure and the pleasure of God.

God gave us the incredible gift of our brains. He’s also given us smart people who sit around in laboratories peering into people’s brains with brain scanners to explain how they work. We need to stay teachable and to learn more about his magnificent creation called the brain. If you are a geek, you can read the report I’ve referenced below.

How about you? What cool things have you learned that have encouraged people to give more generously?

Hare, T., Camerer, C., Knoepfle, D., O’Doherty, J. & Rangel, A. (2012) Value Computations in Ventral Medial PFC during Charitable Decision Making Incorporate Input from Regions Involved in Social Cognition. The Journal of Neuroscience, 30 (2), pp.583–590.

Related posts:

• The 4 Reasons People Give to Their Church

Wise leaders carefully manage church change. Healthy church management includes not just the bird’s eye view (big picture implications) but also considers the individual view, what’s going on inside the individual church member or leader when you, as the leader, present change. Neuroscience offers helpful insight about unconscious processes that go on inside our brains when people face change. Consider these insights and suggestions the next time you plan change for your church.

People appreciate certainty and autonomy because the brain craves both. David Rock, one of the leader proponents of applying neuroscience to leadership (neuroleadership) suggests an acrostic called SCARF that represents five essential brain processes that influence motivation and change management. See my blog here that explains SCARF. The ‘c’ and the ‘a’ stand for certainty and autonomy. I’ve listed 5 insights below that relate these two components to change management.

1. People naturally assume the worst. Our brain is actually wired to pick up threats and negative possibilities around us more than the positive. 2/3 of our brain cells in the flight-fight part of our brain, the amygdala, are wired to pick up on the negative.
2. People naturally fill in knowledge gaps with fear. Uncertainty about the future (and change) breeds this fear.
3. Ambiguity creates more fear than measured risk. That is, the more people have to fill in the knowledge gaps, the greater the fear about and resistance to change. Measured risk, however, fills in some of those gaps and lessens anxiety.
4. Undoing a wrong impression is harder than creating a good impression. It’s the old adage “you don’t have a second chance to make a good first impression.” That’s not just a quaint saying. Neuroscientists have shown it to be true.
5. People understate their ability to ride out difficult future events. Uncertainty causes us to poorly forecast how well we can face difficulty. The term is “affective forecasting.” When you present change, people will initially assume that the church will come out worse than expected, although the opposite is often true.
6. Emotions play a very important part in decision making. Just presenting the facts is seldom enough to move people forward.

So, in light of these insights, what are some positive steps you can take to most effectively manage church change?

1. Build in small, short-term wins along the way. These wins will give a greater sense of certainty. Remember, people (and their brains) love certainty.
2. Fill in the knowledge gaps with truth. In other words, communicate, communicate, communicate. Keep people in the loop about your progress with the change initiative.
3. Provide a feedback loop. Give people in your church a real, tangible way they can give feedback to you about the process. Simply knowing they have that ability to communicate to you and that you are really listening will decrease their anxiety about the future.
4. Within reason, provide people small ways they can choose about how the change will look. Although the leadership will have decided the big picture change, providing options and opportunity for people to hone what those changes within the big change will look like increases autonomy. Remember, people love autonomy.
5. Fill in knowledge gaps with Faith. Preach and teach on faith. Keep verses like Hebrews 11.1 often before the people.

Heb. 11.1 Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. (NLT)

What have you done that has helped smooth church change?

Related Posts: 

• 6 Keys to Mastering Church Change  
• Etch-a-Sketch Church Planning  

I’m enrolled in a master’s degree program in neuroleadership. Yep, that word’s a mouthful. Click on my home page on "Waht is a neuroleader" to see a cool video that explains the term neuroleadership.

I’m learning some fascinating insights about the brain that can help us pastors lead, speak, and live more effectively. In today’s blog, I’d like you to ask yourself this question: Would most people say my sermons are hard to listen to or easy to? Take a moment and stop reading and answer that question for yourself.

Well, we all hope that people would say easy to listen to, right?

I’ve included below a short checklist, based on neuroscience insight, that might give you a clue.

Before I give you the checklist, I want set the stage with a few facts about the brain.

1. The executive functions that occur like concentration, abstract reasoning, problem solving, and attention occur primarily in the pre-frontal cortex, the area roughly behind your forehead. This is the part of the brain you hope your sermons engage. If your listeners don’t engage this part of the brain, your sermon “went in one ear and out the other.”
2. This part of the brain processes information in a serial fashion (one thing at a time). Think of a conveyer belt with one item on it followed by another followed by another, etc. You may recall Lucille Ball’s famous candy conveyor belt episode. If something happens at the front end of that conveyer belt and all the items get clogged up, then nothing moves forward. The same thing happens in the brain. It will only process one thing at a time and if overloaded, it processes very little information. Multi-tasking is a misnomer. See my blog post on multi-tasking here.
3. The pre-frontal cortex tires easily. If a speaker does not give breaks for the listener’s brain to rest, it will take its own breaks.
4. Five fundamental processes summarize what the brain does: it understands, decides, recalls, memorizes, and inhibits (that is, blocks out distractions).

You can see that many complex processes are going on the brains of our listeners. So, how can we maximally engage their brains so that the Holy Spirit has lots of biblical truth to work with to ultimately bring about life transformation?

I’ve included a few ideas below based on neuroscience.

• Start out telling the people where you’re going with your sermon. Give an outline or a metaphor that points in a specific direction. The term is called pre-encoding. Learning is the encoding part. Pre-encoding sets up the listener to learn.
• Don’t aimlessly ramble. If you constantly chase rabbits, their brains will check out.
• Don’t use complex terms and long sentences. When you do, the listener’s brain will tune you out to try to figure out what you just said. They essentially won’t hear what you say next.
• A close cousin: be careful about using abstract ideas. Again, the brain will try to process abstract ideas and tune out what you say next.
• If you do present a complex idea, stop and give a few seconds to allow people to process it and think about it. In other words, mix up the rate at which you deliver your sermons. Pauses are good.
• Simplify your power points. Use only a few words per slide. Pictures that explain your points are even better.
• Don't get long-winded. You may have the ability to keep people’s attention for more than 30 or so minutes. If you do, you don’t need to read this blog. But, in an age when attention spans are rapidly decreasing, shorter sermons will stick better.

What insights have you discovered that help your listeners absorb more?

Related Posts.

Your Brain’s Leadership X-factor   

5 Ways to get People to Pay Attention to Your Sermons 

http://www.charlesstone.com

Motivating staff and volunteer leaders in the church or in any organization begs the question: How can we do it better? I believe David Rock, author and speaker, offers fresh insight from neuroscience about how we can best motivate others. He developed a paradigm based on five domains that influence behavior that he coined with the acronym SCARF.

The letters in this acronym stand for these domains that affect brain functioning and thus performance in our jobs and ministries.

• Status: a feeling of importance relative to others around us
• Certainty: a sense of predictability about the future
• Autonomy: a sense of control over events
• Relatedness: a sense of safety with those around you
• Fairness: a perception of being treated fairly

When a staff person, employee, or volunteer experiences SCARF in his or her ministry it actually increases a chemical in their brain called dopamine which has a positive effect on our moods and our thinking. When a leader intentionally tries to meet the SCARF needs of those around him or her the more he will see positive results in these areas. The less these needs are met, the opposite will occur.

• collaboration
• intrinsic motivation
• productivity
• change management
• healthy relationships

So how might a church leader meet some of the SCARF needs in his church or team? Consider these.

Status: Teach that every person has intrinsic worth and value in God’s eyes. Just because a person lacks certain skills does not mean his status in God’s eyes is anything less than someone who seems to be super talented.

Certainty: Keep your people informed about the future. Don’t spring new initiatives on them. Don’t blindside them. Give them sufficient time to process something new. Consistently do this.

Autonomy: Don’t micromanage. Give choices to your staff and volunteers within reasonable parameters. Let them own some decisions.

Relatedness: Provide plenty of time for your teams to do social stuff together. Encourage involvement in a small group. Intentionally build community.

Fairness: Make sure you treat everyone fairly. Don’t ever play favorites.

Motivating others will always test us as leaders. The SCARF model can help us become more intentional and effective in how we motivate them for Kingdom impact.

What have you found that has helped motivate those you work with?

Related posts:

• Not Motivated: Try a Simple Pleasure
• The 4 Reasons People Give to their Church

Rock, D. (2008) SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. Neuroleadership Journal, (1), pp.44–52.

Recently I scheduled a plumber to fix minor leaks in some toilets in our home as are preparing to sell our house. My wife was to meet the plumber in my absence and give him the instructions I had given her. At about ten minutes after the appointment time she called and told me that he had come and said the fixes were so simple I could do them. I asked her what he charged us to give us that sage advice. Her response? “$125.” I was not a happy camper.

When she told me that he had left without fixing the toilets and then charged us, my emotions took over. I was ticked off. Livid better describes how I felt. I couldn't even think straight. My wife immediately sensed the anger in my voice and assured me that she’d call him back and have him return to complete the repairs.

After we hung up, I felt bad that I had gotten so angry. I tried to regain my composure because I had scheduled a full day to complete a chapter for my next book. We pastors often want to figure out why bad things happen, so I began to ruminate over the situation, thinking that if I figured it out, I could calm my emotions.

Well, I am anything but a handyman. I can’t drive a nail straight much less fix something as convoluted as a toilet. I imagined myself spending an entire day trying to fix the leaks. I could see myself breaking something worse that would force sewerage back up into the house. And with all the sewerage, we’d never sell the house. And because we couldn’t sell the house, we go into foreclosure and lose the house. And when we lost the house we’d have to live in a van down by the river . . . . Well, maybe I didn’t imagine it that bad. But I did imagine me getting hyper-stressed trying to fix the toilet.

Then I recalled some neuroscience research from Ethan Kross’ on distancing and emotional control. He has discovered a simple technique that helps moderate our anger: take the perspective of a third party observing yourself in the situation that prompted the anger.

When I recalled that research, I now imagined myself physically stepping away from the car, where I got my wife’s call, and watching myself talking to her and getting angry. When I did that, immediately I thought, “How silly to get upset over a leaky toilet.” It was amazing what happened next. That simple mental exercise helped quickly lessen my anger. As a result, I was able to think clearly the rest of the day without any emotional “leaky toilet” intrusions. Kross likens that phenomenon to how a friend can help us calm down by giving us an objective perspective of an emotion causing event.

We pastors often face issues that can make us mad.The next time that happens to you, step back and observe yourself becoming angry. See if the Holy Spirit will give you a fresh perspective and clearer insight to moderate your anger and be a more composed leader.

What has helped moderate your anger in ministry?

Related posts.

• Lessons Learned from Angry Emails
• When Someone Screw up: Reprimand or Look for the Teachable Moment

The leadership lull: every leader faces disappointment about unmet expectations whether in real-time or whether those expectations lie in our minds. We have a down Sunday. A new ministry doesn’t take off. A seasonal program doesn’t bring as many new people as we expected. We can get stuck in a downward spiral.

Our brains actually can contribute to this downward cycle. When we feel disappointed, a brain chemical that helps us feel positive, dopamine, drops which causes us to operate more from an emotional mode rather than from a thoughtful one from the thinking part of our brain (the pre-frontal cortex). This decreases our performance because we enjoy our ministry less which leads to decreased confidence. The spiral continues downward as our decreased confidence dampens our mood which further drops dopamine.

When we face such scenarios, five simple steps can help us move from a downward spiral to an upward spiral. When we apply these steps and appropriately adjust our expectations, God created our brains to give us a dose of dopamine which makes us feel better about our our ministries and life in general. This in turn can improve our performance whcih actually makes us more open to spiritual and leadership insight. As a result we get a confidence boost about the future. Thus, we move more into an upward spiral.

Here are five steps to try the next time you find yourself in a leadership lull.

1. Take a few moments and read a few uplifting portions of Scripture about hope, God’s grace, and joy.
2. Write down the expectation that was unmet. Was it unrealistic given the current circumstances? Can you adjust it down a bit to bring it more in line with current circumstances or with what God is telling you?
3. Think of something unusual or out-side-the box that could apply to this situation. Is there a unique or novel way to frame or modify your expectation? Novelty helps boost those brain chemicals that help us gain perspective and think more clearly.
4. Take a small step to accomplish something related to this goal that was not met or to another goal. Make it anything that you can accomplish easily and quickly. After you do, take another small step. Each successive accomplishment will boost your confidence.
5. Call a friend you trust who can help you think through the situation. Often we need someone else to give us perspective when we lose it.

The next time you face a leadership lull, try one or two of these simple steps.

What have you found that helps pull you out of a leadership lull?

• Related Post:When You Don't Measure Up

Sustaining and growing a healthy church requires systematic leadership training. To lead most effectively, staff, boards, and volunteers need to constantly improve their knowledgebase and skills. I’m enrolled in a two-year program to get a masters degree in neuroleadership (check out the cool animation about neuroleadership here: www.charlesstone.com). In a recent webinar lecture, my teacher used a technique that pastors can use to increase attention and retention in their leadership training meetings. Here’s what she did.

Drowsy from a poor night’s sleep and in a brain fog because of too many carbs for lunch, I forced myself to log in for my class. Had I been given a choice, I would have taken a nap instead. My attention level was low. However, the professor used several simple techniques to rouse my attention. As a result, I learned a lot from the lecture.

On one power point slide she printed a single URL. She cued up the slide in this way. She said we were about to do an exercise that required us to focus for 30 seconds on people in the video who wore white shirts and were throwing a ball to each other. We were to count the number of times they passed the ball. She also commented that most people’s attention span lasts only 12 seconds.

Immediately part of my brain alerted other parts to pay attention because something was about to happen. These internal dynamics helped elevate my attention with a shot of norepinephrine, which is related to adrenalin. And we all know what adrenalin does to us. In this 30 second exercise she used 6 techniques that literally woke me and helped me learn better.

1. Curiosity: the exercise woke up the part of my brain that is drawn to novelty. Novel things get our attention more easily than common things.
2. Challenge: I was drawn into the lecture by the prospect of competition with others and with myself. I now wanted to learn.
3. Motivation: the 12-second rule motivated me. I thought to myself, I know I can pay attention longer than that.
4. Relevance: related to the challenge, not only was I good with numbers but the exercise was relevant to the current topic about attention.
5. Anticipation: in anticipation I sat up in my chair, opened my eyes wider, and felt my heart rate elevate.
6. Satisfaction: After the exercise, I felt good because I had beaten the odds and gotten the right answer. This good feeling was due to the increase of another neurotransmitter, dopamine, which makes us feel good when it enters our brain’s pleasure center (the nucleus accumbens).

The next time you schedule a leadership meeting, try to use several of these simple techniques to increase attention and thus improve learning.

What techniques have you tried that have helped enhance your leadership meetings?

Related posts:

• Discover Your Leadership Vibe in Five Minutes
• Are your Shadow Beliefs Stifling Your Leadership?

One of the most disconcerting feelings we pastors experience is when we prepare a sermon and pour our heart into it, yet feel that it didn’t make a difference in people’s lives. It’s equally frustrating when we preach to see somebody tuning us out.

What can we do to help people pay more attention to our sermons? For when they do, there’s a greater chance what we say will stick in their minds to give the Holy Spirit time to ultimately change their hearts.

Neuroscience is teaching us a lot about how people remember things. Two mental processes related to attention simultaneously activate in the minds of those sitting in the pews on Sundays.

• Focus: the ability to attend to what you are saying.
• Inhibiting distractions: the ability to tune out competing information. Those distractions can be external like a baby crying or internal like self-talk or mulling over memories of what happened on the way to church.

So what can we do when we preach to help increase attention? I’ve listed 5 neuroscience insights to keep in mind as you prepare your sermons.

1. Mood matters. Scientists have discovered that when people are in a good mood they pay better attention. We can’t change what happened to a family on the way to church (ie-a fight), but we can take some steps to help put them in a good mood. Humor is a great tool that does that. Don’t begin your sermon with something heavy. Rather, try to interject some humor. Smile and put people at ease.
2. The head cannot take more than the seat can endure is true. Our brains need downtime. They can’t concentrate for long periods of time. In fact, the brain will make downtime for itself when it gets tired. So, build ebb and flow into your sermons. Alternate intensity (something that may require intensive concentration) with points or stories that don’t take much concentration.
3. See your sermons like firing a gun. Three distinct processes take place in the brain for attention to occur. It’s firing a gun: load, aim, fire. To load is when the brain is alerted to take notice. Aim is when it looks for more information. Fire is when it actually acts. So develop your sermon with this in mind. Build each point around the load—aim—fire process.
4. Include novelty in your sermons. Attention increases with something novel or new. Include a couple of surprises. Perhaps you pull out a “show and tell” item unexpectedly to illustrate a point. Maybe you move to a different location from where you usually preach (ie-off the stage and into an aisle).
5. Make it relevant. Preaching is connecting the then and there to the here and now. We must try to help people apply the message to their lives. The brain pays much more attention when it senses relevance. Don’t just wait until the end for application. Provide application points throughout the sermon.

Ultimately, we want our sermons to stick in the listener’s long-term memory. The more they stick, the greater the chance for the Holy Spirit to bring about life transformation.

What presentation techniques you found that helps sermons stick?

Relates Posts:

• How Much Time Should a Pastor Spend on Sermon Prep 
• How an Improv Class Improved My Preaching

One of the greatest strengths a leader can posses is his (or her) ability keep his emotions in check. However, when we feel rejected, hurt, or fearful, we often react, get visibly angry, or becoming defensive. Those responses can hinder God’s work in our lives and hurt our leadership. So what can we do?

Scripture consistently speaks against allowing anger (or any other negative emotion) to control us.

• “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,… (Eph. 4.26)
• Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. (Eph. 4.31)
• But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. (Col. 3.8)
• My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. (James 1.19-20)

But, how do we control these feelings that sometimes spring upon us without our even thinking about them? Often when we feel angry or fearful, we believe that suppressing those feelings will reduce their power. On the contrary, it does the opposite. Neuroscientists have discovered that when we try to suppress an emotion it negatively affects us in two ways.

1. It diminishes our memory and the ability to see and remember details of an event.
2. Most importantly, suppressing the emotion actually does the opposite. Rather than helping us control it, it actually diminishes the internal resources available for us to respond to the situation in a biblical way. Scientists are now discovering what the Bible said long ago: So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. (Gal. 5.16)

The next time one of these emotions begins to control your thinking and behavior, consider apply the steps behind the acronym CART, a simple way to control an unhealthy expression of an emotion.

• “C” stands for change the situation. If you can appropriately change or avoid your situation so that you can avoid what could cause the emotion, do so. This is the easiest way to ‘nip it in the bud’ before it becomes full blown. Recently I became very angry about what someone did. I was not able to remove myself from the situation because the act was done at a distance. So, the issue was in my head rather than in physical close proximity. I had to move to the next step.
• “A” stands for attend to a distraction. If some event prompts one of these emotions, distract yourself. Look for something else to think about or focus on. In the above situation my anger was rising to a boiling point. I then tried to distract myself by listening to an mp3 talk on neuroleadership which somewhat moderated the emotion. However, I kept tuning out the talk and tuning into my internal self-talk that kept the emotion active. I then applied the next step.
• “R” stands for reappraise the situation. After I realized that my mp3 distraction could not consistently lessen my emotion, I sat back in my chair, closed my eyes, and for a few moments thought about what I was thinking about. This is called mindfulness. I then intentionally began to look at the situation differently. I reminded myself that my love for this person should trump my anger toward her. I told myself that my anger would not change her, much less facilitate a reasonable conversation with her about her actions. As I began to mentally prioritize my relationship with her over her action, the emotion’s intensity began to complete this process of regulating this emotion.
• “T” stands for temper my visible response. At first I tried to suppress my emotion, which only increased it (as I mentioned above). However, after I admitted my anger and reappraised the situation (R), the Lord helped me avoid a potentially unhealthy and damaging reaction toward this person.

So, the next time an emotion begins to get the best of you, toss it into a CART.

What has worked for you to control your emotions in a healthy way?

Related posts:

• 5 Animals Pastors Sometimes Act Like
• 9 Signs your Hormones May be Hijacking Your Leadership

Disapproval and rejection can sting and wound. We’ve all felt it. What do we do when important people in our lives (or even those that we don’t deem important) reject us? How do we respond as did Jesus when he was rejected and scorned?

1Pet. 2.23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.

Years ago I experienced deep disapproval and rejection from some key church leaders. Essentially they told me that I wasn’t a good leader nor could I inspire people when I preached God’s Word. I was devastated and the effects lingered for months. At the time I didn’t process this rejection well. In retrospect, however, I now understand why this hurt so much and what to do about it.

God created our bodies and our mental command and control center, our brains, with two overall systems that profoundly impact how we think and feel. Our refleXive system (think X–system) is the one that acts without thinking. When it controls, our emotions often take over. The other system, our refleCtive system (think C-system) is the one that helps us think clearly and biblically when our emotions want us to do otherwise. When our X-system controls, we become highly emotional and reactive which dampens our C-system’s ability to think clearly and objectively. However, when we submit our C-system to the Holy Spirit, we are able to think more in line with the Apostle Paul’s command in Philippeans 4.8.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.

Because I failed to appropriately filter their disapproval with the mind of Christ (His thoughts and perspective), my response prompted my brain to release neurochemicals, called catecholamines, that revved up my C-system. This in turn further diminished my ability to think and lead effectively in these three ways.

• Mental exhaustion: My brain’s check engine light was always on. One part of our brain (the anterior cingulate cortex) senses inconsistencies we detect in verbal or non-verbal messages we get from others. Because those leaders often gave me mixed messages about my performance (you are a great guy... you don't inspire people), that part of my brain was constantly ‘on.’ I become mentally exhausted which bred even more anxiety about the situation.
• Easily defensive: My brain’s impulse control brake pads wore thin. I’m usually able to control my emotions and avoid defensiveness. However, because the stress had tired my brain and body, the part of my brain that helps control impulses and emotions (the ventral lateral pre-frontal cortex) had little ‘brake pad’ left. As a result, I was not able to carry on objective conversations about their perspective,which would have helped. Instead, I became defensive, didn’t listen well to their viewpoints, and reacted to small irritations at home.
• Inability to concentrate: My brain’s mental etch-a-sketch could not hold a creative thought long without losing it. An important part of the brain (the dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex) gives us the ability to plan, hold items in memory, and think abstractly. However, I could barely concentrate which impacted my ability to think creatively when preparing a sermon or when planning a new initiative. My brain felt like an etch-a-sketch constantly being shaken causing the picture on it to quickly dissolve. I often defaulted to mindless activities such as reading CNN several times daily rather than focusing on the more important mind-taxing tasks ministry demanded.

When leaders feel rejected, these internal processes will occur unless with the Spirit’s power we proactively take action to counter them. In my next post I discuss how we can counter these tendencies when we feel rejected.

When others have rejected you, what negative consequences have you seen in your leadership?

Related post: 

• Your Brain's Leadership X-Factor
• When Pastors Lead from their Lizard Brains

Whether we lead a church ministry, a para-church organization, or run a business, we Christian leaders want to lead at our best. Books, leadership seminars, coaching, and mentoring can all help us grow our skills. I’ve used all three to develop mine. Recently, though, I’ve realized an emerging and rapidly growing field is filling a gap in spiritual leadership. 

It’s called neuroleadership. Essentially, neuroleadership takes what neuroscience is discovering about the brain and applies it to the art of spiritually leading. You can see a cool animation here by clicking on “What is neuroleadership?” David Rock, author of  a great book, Your Brain at Work, coined the term.

Interestingly, the bible affirms neuroleadership principles. The word 'mind' appears over 120 times in scripture. Solomon writes in Proverbs that as we think so we are. The Gospel writers tell us to love God with all of our hearts and souls and minds and strength. And the Apostle Paul reminds us that we experience true transformation when we renew our minds. Curt Thompson who wrote Anatomy of the Soul writes that neuroscience is much like a magnifying glass to help us see things we may not otherwise have seen. But a magnifying glass is only as good as the light that illuminates the object we are looking at. That light, for a Christian, is God’s Word.

When pastors and Christian leaders learn and apply neuroleadership principles, they will develop into competent leaders who . . .

• stay cool under pressure.
• improve relationships with others.
• consistently make wise ministry decisions.
• strategize and navigate change well.
• learn to inspire others through their teaching.

Over the next several months I plan several blogs on how we can leverage this incredible God-created gift, the brain, for greatest Kingdom impact. To maximize our minds and brains, consider these three essentials.

1. Learn how the brain works. Without trying to become an anatomy expert, take a few minutes to Google “brain” and read a few articles about how the brain works and its anatomy. You’ll also find several good YouTube videos as well. This four-minute video summarizes the techniques scientists are now using to learn more about the brain. This 55-minutes video by David Rock explains how understanding the brain can make a big difference in your leadership.
2. Practice good brain care habits. Adequate sleep, healthy food, and regular exercise all help keep your brain sharp and functioning well. Scientists have also discovered that managing stress also protects the brain.
3. Learn the art of self-awareness. Often our brain focuses on negative thoughts that take up precious brain space we need to think and lead well. When we “think about what we are thinking about” we have begun to win the battle against negative thinking. The Apostle Paul speaks to this issue in Phil. 4.8 when he writes, Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.

So, as you grow in your leadership, consider how to use your brain to maximize your life and leadership.

In your education and experience, how have your insights into how the brain works helped your leadership?

Related posts:

1. When Pastors Lead from their Lizard Brains
2. 9 Signs Your Hormones May be Hijacking Your Leadership

Productivity for leaders demands wise time management. But will multi-tasking make us better time managers? This study says no.

A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common “productivity tools” can make one as dumb as a stoner. (David Rock, Your Brain at Work, p. 36)

Many leaders, including me, have too often convinced themselves that multi-tasking leads to better time management. Actually, it doesn't. Researchers have shown that when we try to do two mental tasks at once, our cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight year old (Rock, p. 34).

Although we technically can do two tasks at once, it dramatically slows our mental processing. So, if you think you are saving time by multi-tasking, you really aren't. Neuroscientists call this dual-task interference. Because the high level thinking part of our brain (the pre-frontal cortex) works in a serial fashion, one item at a time, when we multi-task we clog up its processing speed and actually reduce our effectiveness.

Linda Stone, a former VP at Microsoft captured the essence in the term continuous partial attention. She describes it this way. "To pay continuous partial attention is to keep a top-level item in focus, and constantly scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." As a result, this "always on" mode puts our brains on constant alert, thus flooding them with too much stress hormone which slows processing.

So what can we do to moderate this tendency?

• Imbed repetitive tasks deep into our long term memory so we that we can actually do them without thinking. An example is driving. We don't really think about driving because we've done it long enough to make it a habit. Such habits don't require the executive functions of our brains. Rather, they are stored into the part of our brain that stores routine functions, the basal ganglia.

• Prioritize your tasks for the day. Every day take a few minutes to plan your day so that you do the most mentally taxing things first. This appointment with the executive center of our brains assures we do our best thinking for what demands it.

• Turn off notifications on your computer or mobile device. I thought in my iPad and iPhone all I had to do was to keep an app out of Notifications. I just realized that I have to go into settings and turn off notifications in each app. When I read, I hated getting the reminders at the top of the screen which interrupted my train of thought. I no longer get them.

• Determine when you will attend to those tasks that interrupted you. When I write or study, I turn off email. But every hour or so when I take a break, I will turn it on and quickly look at email and respond to those that I can in the moment. That way I can focus on that which requires my mental energy and check off those less demanding tasks at those scheduled times .

How do you handle the multi-tasking monster?

Related posts:

• Your Brain's Leadership X-factor

• When Pastors Lead from their Lizard Brain

I'm currently in a master's program in neuroleadership through Middlesex University in the UK and I'm having a blast.  Christian leaders and pastors can learn much from the latest neuroscience discoveries about the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain profoundly  impacts leadership, emotional regulation, motivating others, navigating change, team building, and effective communication.

If you spend much time preaching or teaching, you'll find this blog helpful.

Every ministry leader wants others to become more like Jesus. For that to happen, their thinking, behavior, and habits must change. Those changes don't occur in a void. Rather, God takes what we learn about the bible, character, and God honoring behavior to transform us. A major input to this new way of living comes through our preaching and teaching.

But for lasting change to occur, our brains must imbed new information into our long-term memory instead of our short-term memory. Think of the difference between cramming for a test in geography the night before the test (we soon forget the facts) and learning a new language (if we continue to use it, the language gets imbedded deep within our memories). Neuroscientists call this embedding process consolidation. The name itself pictures the process. Although initial information comes into our minds through our five senses, it passes through a part of the brain called the hippocampus. However, if we want the new information (i.e. our sermons) to stick, the memories must be spread to other parts of the brain to consolidate them into long term memory.

So if you want to increase the chance that life transformation happens through your preaching and teaching, consider these practical steps to help imbed your teaching into long term memory thus making your sermons more "sticky."

1. Increase focused attention by engaging more senses than just sight and sound. Creatively use taste, smell and touch. When people pay more attention to your sermons, they engage the hippocampus more. And unless it is engaged, people won't remember what you say.
2. Deliver your sermon in an organized way. Use a visual metaphor or picture at the beginning to tie the talk together. If you deliver your sermon in a random way, memory decreases.  This is called pre-encoding which organizes the brain to remember better.
3. Break up the message into two parts and place a different element between each (ie. video or music). In the second part creatively review the content you presented in the first part. The following week again review the previous week's main points. Neuroscientists have discovered that spacing between learning something and practicing it increases memory retention.
4. Use a power point flashcard at the end of the talk by asking the people to fill in the blanks of your sermon’s key points. When someone self-generates information it sticks much better than when they are simply told information.
5. Ask the people to personally apply one aspect of the message to their own lives. This concept called self-relevant processing deepens memory more than almost anything else. It relates to helping them emotionally connect to what you want them to learn. Emotional stamping is a powerful memory enhancer.
6. Ask the people to imagine themselves not only doing the application but also to imagine the context (where) in which they will do it. Again, neuroscience has discovered that people recall memories better when they imagine the context in which they learned or practiced something new.

Run last week's bible study or sermon through this grid and see what improvements you can make for next week.

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X-Factor: A variable in a situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome.

X-Factor: a tv show by Simon Cowell that didn't do so well.

The term X-factor usually carries a positive mystique, a quality not readily identified except by its impact. We'll say...

• The singer has the X-factor that makes her great.
• The business leader has the X-factor that makes her successful.
• The pastor has the X-factor that makes him engaging.

But what about the brain's X-factor? Is it a good quality?

Neuroscience has recently discovered important concepts that can enhance a leader's leadership impact. Essentially our brain uses two processing systems through which we lead, interact with people, and control our emotional and behavioral responses.

Daniel Kahneman, a Noble prize winner, explains these systems in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow  as system 1 and system 2. Matthew Lieberman, a professor at UCLA describes the systems as reflexive and reflective. These two words capture the essence of each process.

• reflexive, the X-system (the X-factor): that part of our brain that if overstimulated reacts and acts impulsively. It's spontaneous and acts automatically.
• reflective, the C-system: that part of our brain that acts with intention and thinks before acting. It regulates emotionally reactivity.

In my 30 years in ministry I've been taught and have taught that practicing various spiritual disciplines will yield a controlled, Spirit-filled life. But how many of us leaders, although we practice those disciplines, can react with anger to a staff person, become defensive at a lay leader's comment, or simply act like a jerk in the heat of the moment?

We're all guilty. I know I am. So what's missing?

I believe that Christian leadership teaching has failed to incorporate what neuroscience has discovered about how our brain functions. I'm now on a quest to evangelize Christian leaders to learn how our God-given brain can serve us well.

The two systems I mentioned above, when in balance, work in tandem to help us lead well. However, when the X-system gets overloaded, the X-factor hinders effective leadership.

When we experience stress, the X-factor strengthens as hormones (primarily epinephrine and dopamine) surge into our brains and create these problems.

• The  brain's executive center we need for creativity and planning gets tired and becomes ineffective. It's like a girl drawing a picture with an etch-a-sketch and her brother repeatedly grabbing it and shaking it, thus erasing her uncompleted picture. Similarly, when the X-factor kicks in, we can't keep those critical creative thoughts in our minds long enough to make them stick.
• Emotional accelerators diminish the impulse braking centers in our brain.
• The reactive parts of our brain take over and we can become defensive.
• Objectivity diminishes.
• We don't listen well to others because our brains can't concentrate on other's viewpoints without prematurely framing our own responses.
•  We default to easy, mindless activities such as excessively checking emails rather than focusing on important tasks.

Stay tuned for more blogs on this subject.

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Related post: When Pastors Lead from their Lizard Brains.

Last week Augusta, Georgia hosted one of the world’s most prestigious golf tournaments, The Masters. Tiger Woods, a four-time winner and arguable today’s most talented golfer made the cut. He entered the tournament hoping for a strong showing. Unfortunately he finished tied for 40^th.

What happened?

Neuroscience gives us clues not only to Tiger’s downward spiral that began when his personal foibles became public in 2009, but to how leaders lose their effectiveness when they don’t lead themselves well.

Leaders need at least three components to self-lead: competency, composure, and concentration. These three brain structures influence these qualities.

• Competency: the basil ganglia, through a reward system, help fashion skill and form habits that develop competency.
• Composure: the limbic system must stay balanced to ensure emotional control and to aid composure.
• Concentration: the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), the brain’s executive center, facilitates good decision-making and promotes concentration.

In Tiger’s case, for years his basil ganglia have helped him hone his superb golfing skills. And as every golfer knows, golf is a mind game and requires intense concentration. His pre-frontal cortex has served him well as his past performance has shown his ability to concentrate during tournaments. Unfortunately this time his limbic system had a meltdown on the 16^th hole when he kicked his clubs and cursed, a golfer’s faux pas. His game went downhill from then.

Without disparaging Tiger, his story provides a living metaphor for leaders who recognize self-leadership is a pre-requisite to leading others. The basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the pre-frontal cortex must all ‘dance’ together for us to self-lead well. When they don’t, basal ganglia developed skills fall short, PFC aided concentration evaporates, and limbic system meltdowns replace composure.

And when that happens, the result is costly. In Tiger’s case, he earned only $32,000. The winner earned $1,441,000.

What has you experience been when a leader around you lost his or her self-leadership composure through a meltdown?

_____

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God gave us this magnificent creation called the brain.Weighing less than three pounds, it wields incredible influence over how well leaders lead. Although we usually call the brain a computer, it's more like a pharmacy that constantly dispenses drugs (hormones) into our bodies which affects our emotions, our thinking, and our leadership

Dr. David Rock, recognized as one of the leading spokesmen in a new field called neuroleadership wrote the book Your Brain at Work. In it he winsomely describes how the brain works and how it affects leadership. I hightly recommend this book to all leaders, especially pastors.

Essentially, neuroleadership describes how brain function relates to leadership.

Brain researchers have discovered that sustained high levels of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline affect our ability to think clearly, creatively, and decisively, thus diminishing our ability to lead most effectively.

And how do sustained high levels of these hormones get into our system?

They get there from chronic anxiety, when we face long-term stress. It's akin to a car accelerator getting stuck and revving at high rpm's for a long period of time. If it continues, the engine will wear out prematurely. In the same way, when leaders and pastors stay stressed 24/7, our anxiety, and thus our hormones, get stuck at a high level which dramatically reduces our ability to lead.

Take this simple assessment to discover how many chronic anxiety markers you currently see in your life.

1. I react and act impulsively when people disagree with me
2. I assume the worst and connect dots where there are none
3. I easily get defensive
4. I don't seem to be as creative as I once was
5. I often find myself in a mental and emotional fog
6. I lose perspective easily
7. I don’t listen well to others, not because I don't want to, but because my mind wanders
8. I find it difficult to concentrate
9. I find that others often mirror my defensiveness and reactiveness

Divert Daily

Withdraw Weekly

Abandon Annually

Although I’m not a physician, as a pastor I’ve learned a lot about the brain through my youngest daughter’s five brain surgeries. Imagine a tootsie roll pop with two centers. Pretend the inner center is a sweet tart surrounded by the gooey tootsie roll that in turn is surrounded by the hard outer candy. Our brains include three parts, like our imaginary tootsie roll pop.

The inner core, called the reptilian brain regulates such functions as circulation and respiration. It’s on automatic pilot. Let’s say you’re sensitive to criticism about your preaching and in a conversation one of your leaders makes this comment. “I sure wish you’d go deeper with your Bible teaching. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are thinking about leaving because they aren’t getting fed.” I don’t think I’ve ever met a pastor or any leader who hasn’t heard a comment like that. If you’ve allowed chronic anxiety to build up inside, you might immediately react without thinking by sarcastically blurting, “I’m doing my best and if they want to leave, I’d be happy for them and me.” Such a comment threatens you and you adapt to this threat from the automatic process of the reptilian part of your brain.

The second part of our brains (the gooey tootsie roll part), the mammalian brain, regulates other functions such as bonding, playing, nurturing and expressions like shock, sorrow, and rejoicing. It also plays a role between pleasure and pain, flight and fight, and tension and relaxation. It serves as the seat of emotion. However, sometimes instead of maintaining balance between our reptilian brain and the third layer (the seat of rational thought), this part of the brain goes haywire. A pastor who enjoys preaching and has seen fruit from it, after enough critical comments, might face a depressive funk that his ministry is fruitless and that he should quit.

Both the reptilian and the mammalian parts of our brain compose about 15%, operate on automatic pilot, and have many connecting neurons. However, our cerebral cortex, the outer brain, encompasses 85% of our brain. At this level God has given us the ability to think, process, gain insight, and choose. It is the seat of intentionality whereas the other two parts are the seats of instinct.

In summary, three brain parts compose our Brain:

Lizard brain (reptilian): on automatic pilot that acts without thinking. Lizards eat their young. Some churches eat their pastors

'Puppy' brain (mammilian): the seat of emotions, also somewhat on automatic pilot

Main brain (neocortex): the place where we think, analyze, choose, create, symbolize, and observe.

God gave us the two lower brain levels. They aren’t inferior, but limited. The neocortex can’t ignore them or else life would be rather dull. However, the neocortex allows us to “reflect on what is happening (insight) and plan for what might happen (foresight).”[1]

When anxiety overwhelms us, we react and these processes take over.

• Impulse overwhelms intention
• Instinct sweeps aside imagination
• Reflexive behavior closes off reflective thought
• Defensive postures block out defined positions
• Emotional reactivity limits clearly determined direction.[2]

Several years ago in an elder’s meeting in our conference room, one of the elders made a statement that implied I lacked a certain competency in my role indicated by something I did. I don’t even remember the specific issue, but I clearly remember my reaction. When he made that statement, I impulsively blurted, “I do not do  that (whatever it was)!” He retorted, “You do it all the time.” I immediately jumped out of my chair, stomped over to the sink area behind me, and in anger said, “I never can please you. Everything I do is just not enough for you, is it?”

For the next ten minutes we went back and forth and it took the finesse of another elder to cool us down.

What happened? I had experienced chronic anxiety toward this elder for some time. And, our elder meetings had gone that well. When I felt attacked, my reptile brain took over. My emotional reactivity came out as impulsive defensiveness. It happened without me even thinking.

In retrospect, I should have paused and allowed the thinking side of my brain rule instead of my emotional side.  My emotions acted faster than my thinking. I didn’t handle my feelings responsibly. I lost objectivity and civility. My unhealthy drivenness to please this leader caused an unnecessary conflict. In reality, his comment probably carried at least a grain of truth in it. Had I been more thoughtful, self-aware, and less anxiety filled anxiety that I had disappointed this leader, the conversation could have turned in a constructive direction. Fortunately, we both cooled down and I apologized for my reacting.

From which brain do you lead when under stress?

Related posts:

• 8 indicators your ministry may be drowning you
• Neuroleadership Clues to Tiger Wood's Meltdown
• 9 Signs Hormones May be Hijacking your Leadership

[1] Peter I. Steinke, How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute), Kindle e-book, locations 313-325.

[2] Ibid, locations 325-334.