Why Every Coach Can Apply Tools From Neuroplasticity

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This post was co-authored by Justin James Kennedy, Ph.D., D.Prof. and Faye Cormick.

Neuroscience plays a role in coaching, education, and therapy, specifically focusing on neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change. Neuroplasticity is crucial for sustainable change and enhancement in self-awareness, motivation, resilience, critical thinking, and vitality. Brain-based protocols and practical applications known as “brain hacks” have been introduced to support behavior change and habit development. The key principles covered include the impact of experiences on neural connections, the social nature of the brain, the influence of habits on neuroplasticity, the flexibility of memories, the effect of emotions on memory, the power of visualization, and the relationship between conscious attention and thoughts. Readers are encouraged to adopt the role of a "neuroplastician" to facilitate enduring change with their clients.

What could be more thrilling than understanding the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience? To understand, in essence, who we are, how we learn and grow? This is, I think, the greatest scientific question of all time.

What does neuroscience have to do with coaching, education, and therapy?

Short answer: Nothing...or everything.

• It’s of no relevance if you want to “grandstand” and share your amazing wisdom.
• It’s everything if you are trying to be the type of coach known as a neuroplastician and want to facilitate neuroplasticity to ensure that your clients’ brains grow.

Since the 1980s, the fact that the brain can change has been well-established academically. This process is called neuroplasticity. It is now time to build practical ways our brains can become flexible and adaptable (or plastic) throughout our lifespan so we sustain new habits.

Create sustainable change with clients.

Effective coaching produces changes in gene expression that alter the strength of synaptic connections via the process of neuroplasticity.

As a neuroplastician, your role is to facilitate change in your client’s thoughts, beliefs, and emotions toward their enhanced resilience, wellness, vitality, and better performance by coaching new, healthy, behavior-based habits. You'll need to build the skills necessary to support lasting change. Principles are presented as practical applications we call brain hacks, which ensure behavior change and develop new habits for health, wellness, business, executive, and life coaches, as well as for educators and therapists.

Doing ensures neuroplasticity: There are neural networks associated with emotions and memories. Some of these can be found in the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. But they are not hard-wired. Certain habits either prune or tune neural connections in response to experiences (Bao S., Chan V. T., Merzenich M. M. (2001)

Your brain is social: We are social animals. It is key to our intelligence. Relationships in childhood and throughout adulthood change the brain through the process of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis (building new neurons). A neuroplastician facilitates this process to ensure that relationships at work and at home help to improve neural connections and well-being (source: Davidson and McEwen, 2012).

Neither nature nor nurture: It is habit formation. Both genetics and the environment interact to shape our brains and influence behavior. But it’s not until we form new habits that neuroplasticity offers benefits. The role of the neuroplastician ensures this and can be thought of as a strategic and purposeful facilitator shaping new neural pathways (Doidge, 2007).

Memories are remembered: Memories are not perfect recall. They are rewritten every time we recall them. Depending on the emotional load, the context, and others, how we retrieve memory is different. Our memories show neuroplasticity. Memory has an imagination component to reinvent the past so that it fits our present and future perceptions (Schacter et al., 1996).

Memories are emotional: Memories and emotions are interconnected neural processes. Emotion also changes memory, for good or bad. The neuroplastician weeds out emotionally irrelevant content and ensures correct memories are laid down for recall. Emotional arousal activates the amygdala, which in turn influences the kind and quality of the memory stored (LeDoux, 1996).

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Imagining creativity: Did you know that visualization activates the brain in the same way behavior does? fMRI scans show that when you think, your brain reacts in the same way that you imagine. Having a vision of the future will change the brain so that you experience it in the future (Basadur M., Pringle P., Speranzini G., Bacot M. (2000).

The brain is not the mind: Our brain cannot feel what we are thinking. Only when we pay conscious attention to the brain’s unconscious processes can we influence our thoughts or feelings. Our mental attention allows us to take new actions and build more effective habits for our future behavior change (Basadur M., Pringle P., Speranzini G., Bacot M. (2000). Basadur, M., Pringle, P., Speranzini, G., & Bacot, M. (2000).