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Unpacking Your Mind 15

about ways of analyzing yourself as a learner. It is very important
to realize that there are no right or wrong ways of approaching life
and learning. Each is equally valuable. Each characteristic is capa-
ble of being described positively and negatively. And the most
important thing of all is that you can change the way you do things.
You can learn to work and live smarter!
In many workplaces, left-brain characteristics appear to be
the ones that are most valued. Increasingly, however, the more
creative elements offered by right-brain thinking are being acknow-
ledged as just as important.
If you have developed the capacity to use your brain effec-
tively, then you will be able to use positive words from all of the seg-
ments to describe your behavior at work. In other words, you will
have learned how to acquire a range of different characteristics.

Where would you put yourself? Do you have more right- or left-brained characteristics? Which
words match your characteristics most? What about those with whom you work closely? What
mix of left- and right-brain characteristics do you think you need to have in a successful team?

Dividing our brains up into imaginary quarters in this way is another
huge oversimplification, although it is biologically true that we do
have two hemispheres in our brain connected by the corpus callosum.
We now know, for example, through the work of Stanislaus Dehaen,
that a simple mathematical sum, which you might assume was a left-
brain function, is much more complex. If you express a problem as
“What is two plus two?” you are probably using the left hemisphere.
But if you reframe the question as “2 + 2 = ?” it is likely that you
will use brain areas in both the right and left sides.
In fact, as Roger Ornstein and others have pointed out, there
is almost nothing that we do that is governed by only one side.
Moreover, we have found out that stroke victims can learn to use
their undamaged side for tasks previously undertaken by the other
side.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to think of the different
approaches that seem to be dominant in the two different halves of
the brain. With a mental model like this we can begin to explore
apparently conflicting approaches to life, the dynamic tensions