Talk, Talk, Talk And Then Talk Some More

I strongly suggest your #1 KPI this week is how many minutes of talk time (not texting) you get with colleagues, advisors, friends, and extended family each day. Dramatically up your talk time. You’ll do them and yourself a huge favor. We all need a lifeline right now – so “phone a friend.” You’ll feel better connecting vs. hiding – and sleep better as well – it literally kills us to hold things in.

Why? It has to do with how our brain has evolved over the 200,000 years humans have been on this planet. In order to survive and thrive we’ve evolved various capabilities. 100,000 years ago, we developed speech; writing just 5000 years ago; and Excel spreadsheets just 35 years ago!

Freeze or Flock

As such, we’re so much more highly evolved to talk our way in and out of situations than we are to think. Now that we can unobtrusively monitor our brain, research has found that both opportunities and challenges are two sides of the same coin – we get the same “reptilian response.”

All the original research with the Amygdala part of our brain was with men – the famous “fight or flight” response – the masculine either had to run at and fight the wildebeest or run away. Interestingly, when we started studying the feminine response, we found they tend to “flock” – a much healthier response.

So as we face these interesting times our fear response is highly activated – and research shows that the more we sit around and just “think” about our issues, the more upset it makes us – we can’t sleep, we can have anxiety attacks, we can then “freeze” in our response.

Share Your Vibration

But the minute we start to talk about our issues the Amygdala shuts down and our pre-frontal lobes light up like a Christmas tree – we can start to reason vs. panic our way through things. We also know that the vibrations put out by our voices alert our global tribe, and that’s when solutions come to us.

How many of you have experienced the situation where you’ve not heard from someone for months (or years); that person happens to come up in a conversation; and moments later they reach out to you – the proverbial,“your ears must have been ringing” phenomenon. So, up your talk time dramatically – take pressure off your fear center and light up your thought center – and put out the vibrations so answers will come your way.