Rewiring Our Brain

Healthy players, Healthy Design and Development teams

Sharing is caring!

by Xoana Terry

09/26/2017

We come into work every morning with our own background, personality and assumptions. We have our own story, way to do our job and expectations for the future.

How does this affect the way we perform and relate to others? How can we create healthy teams with different people, cultures, ideas and expectations?

Disagreements, crisis and confrontations are welcome and can actually benefit the team. Otherwise they can represent a threat to the team’s balance and ability to perform.

What if we decided to choose what we see?

“Living consciously is a state of being mentally active rather than passive. It is the ability to look at the world through fresh eyes. It is intelligence taking joy in its own function. Living consciously is seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our interests, actions, values, purposes and goals. It is the willingness to confront facts, pleasant or unpleasant. It is the desire to discover our mistakes and correct them… It is the quest to keep expanding our awareness and understanding, both of the world external to self and of the world within” – Nathaniel Brande

Changing glasses

The way we see the world, learn and behave as adults is in part the result of our upbringing, environment and own personality. We base our beliefs on our personal experience and contact with others throughout life. We will use them to interact and make choices. Let´s say we have all been given different glasses.

That means we team up everyday with people that bring their own vision of the world into work. Being aware of this and willing to expand our understanding of others is a first step towards an effective team building.

Crafting our own glasses

At NaNLABS building strong teams is a top priority. The quality of our service is directly related to the capacity of the teams to collaborate, solve problems and come up with creative solutions.

We design and develop custom software for clients around the world. That means our teams are made of people from different specialties, countries and of course different mindsets.

The whole company met up a couple of weeks ago to consider the possibility of acting on the way we each see the world. We tackled questions such as:

Does the way we see life and ourselves affect the way we work and contribute to a team?
Can we question our constructed beliefs and generate new and more effective ones?
Can we rewire our brain in order to see the world from another perspective?

Step one: Living consciously

Recognising our differences and being aware that we don’t all work in the same way. Being conscious requires the ability to incorporate new perspectives, think about those around us (clients, collaborators, colleagues) and walk together towards common and personal goals.

Step two: Questioning beliefs

Being able to see things through others’ glasses, incorporating new points of view. Deciding what we want to be like regardless of our mental frames.
We believe each one of us is capable of readjusting the wires and developing into more conscious and effective people.

Step three: Establishing a common ground

Working together on the idea of what we want to be as a team. We started by discussing and defining our values, making sure we had a shared understanding of what these mean. As a result Respect, Empathy, Communication, Common goals, Companionship and Commitment are now hanging on our walls as a reminder of what makes us stick together.

Step four: Bringing visions together

While we’re still on the journey of finding better and healthier ways to work together we want to keep in mind the importance of doing a personal check-up every now and then in order to remove those obstacles that get in the way of focusing on what brings value to the team.

Rewiring our brain has to do with rethinking our behaviours and beliefs, replacing the no-longer useful ones with more purposeful and efficient ones benefiting personal and team´s development.

Do you have any beliefs preventing you from thinking and acting in a way that contributes to the person or team player you want to be? Can we/you find new self-chosen beliefs that will serve us/you better for today´s needs and aspirations?