Understand Your Brain: The series

 

This is Phil Dixon here.

 

This series started life as one book. As I started to develop the structure for the book, it became clear that there was too much for just one book; it would have become huge and probably unreadable. So I decided to break it apart. I decided to write the first book so that it just focused on the underlying theory of the brain – but in such a way that it was oriented towards the subsequent books in what had now become a series. That underlying theory is in the first of the series, Understand Your Brain: For a Change, or UYBFAC.

 

About half-way through the writing of the first book, I re-established my relationship with Scott Fitzgerald, a colleague who had the same passion as I did i.e. to help managers and leaders understand their brains so that they could become better leaders and managers. He helped me to finish the book and drastically improved its appeal to a wider audience. In the final stages of the development of UYBFAC, we determined that there should be at least three more books in the series.

 

The first would be focused on the application of our thoughts about the brain to the workplace. We wanted to produce a book that would give leaders and managers immediate help in taking their newly acquired knowledge of the brain and applying it. As such it would take the form of a guide. Hence its name: A Field Guide to Using Your Brain at Work. We structured it to address four dynamics:

 

• What happens in your brain when you are on your own at work?

• What happens in your brain when you are with one other person (e.g. a peer, your boss or someone that works for you) and what happens in their brain?

• What happens in everyone’s brains when you are with several other people, a small group or a team?

• What happens in the brains of people in an organization – and how do you lead that organization?

 

We anticipate that this book will be published early in 2020.

 

The next book in the series will be a parallel book that addresses a similar set of issues but is focused on our home and social life. Its title will be A Field Guide to Using Your Brain at Home. It will be structured in a similar fashion:

 

• What happens in your brain when you are on your own at home?

• What happens in your brain when you are with one other person (e.g. your spouse, a significant other, your child, a sibling or a parent) and what happens in their brain?

• What happens in everyone’s brains when you are with your whole family or several members of the family

• What happens in the brains of people in your community – and how do you best contribute to that community?

 

Finally, we realized that an important component of all of these dynamics is to be able to listen to, attend to, support and guide others. This is what we generally call coaching. Hence the name of the fourth in the series: A Field Guide to Using Your Brain to Coach. For this book, we have asked another coach who is an expert in the brain, Carla Street, to join us.

 

We are hoping that the third and fourth books will be published late in 2020.