SharpBrains Mental Workout at Cisco Systems

A cou­ple of weeks ago we had a very fun team-build­ing ses­sion, Sharp­Brains at Cis­co Sys­tems, dur­ing the retreat of a Cis­co Sys­tems group. We cov­ered recent brain research and its impli­ca­tions for learn­ing and train­ing, and we intro­duced a lot of fun games and activ­i­ties. Some key take-aways for par­tic­i­pants were:

1. There are fre­quent­ly dif­fer­ent, but equal­ly valid, ways to look at things. We bet­ter try to under­stand each oth­er before we try to impose our ideas (See old lady-young lady game in a lat­er post, under title “What do you see?”)
2. We need to train our “3 inte­grat­ed brains” and 7 key “men­tal muscles”
3. Good brain exer­cise requires nov­el­ty, vari­ety and practice.
4. Doing our best at work and life helps train our brains. Train­ing our brains helps us do our best at work and in life.

We went through some areas rel­e­vant to busi­ness life, through the eyes of neuroscience

1. Devel­op Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion through movement
2. Improve Team­work through emo­tion­al under­stand­ing, appre­ci­a­tion and learn­ing to man­age stress
3. Man­age mul­ti-task­ing through Atten­tion and Mem­o­ry techniques
4. Lead­er­ship through focus, plan­ning and learning
5. Com­mu­ni­cate through relat­ing to dai­ly expe­ri­ences, and analogies
6. Improve con­fi­dence through a clear vision, and visu­al­ize success

If you were in charge of train­ing exec­u­tives in your com­pa­ny, what oth­er areas would you emphasize?