For the past two weeks, as part of a semester-long project for my COMSTRAT 563 course at Washington State University, I've been running a digital marketing campaign to promote Our2Brains. I've posted content to our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter aimed at increasing awareness about the brand and generating interest and engagement from our audience.
As the campaign comes to a close, I'd like to use my final blog post to give special thanks to my family, friends and colleagues who participated as members of my "audience." Your interaction along the way has given me some great data to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. More importantly, your generous feedback has been so valuable to me by giving me confidence that I am actually capable of creating, planning and implementing a digital marketing campaign. When the semester began, I wasn't so sure I could pull it off. But your involvement and feedback are evidence that my pre-existing belief about my abilities was a self-defeating distortion. Distortions in what we believe about ourselves, I'm learning, can severely limit our potential. That's why at Our2Brains, we're committed to helping people unlock their own power and potential. We all have it within us. But it's not always easy to see it in ourselves and often, it's even harder to change what we believe about ourselves. As humans, we're social creatures. We need each other to help us see through our distortions and see our true selves as others see us. You've certainly done that for me during the course of this project. So thank you, a million times, thank you. I hope I've inspired you as well. - T.J.
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"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw
We all have beliefs about ourselves, our world, and our place in it. But how many of us have honestly questioned what we believe and why we believe it? Challenging our deeply-held beliefs can be uncomfortable because so much of our personal identity is based on what we believe. Questioning our beliefs is hard because it means we might have to admit we were wrong. And few of us like to admit when we're wrong. A friend and I were talking politics not long ago. We each have different beliefs about various issues. In the course of our conversation, we both presented and defended our positions. At one point in the conversation, my friend interjected and asked, "Are you trying to change me?" I replied, "No, I don't want to change you. Only you can change you." This is a valuable lesson I've learned over the years. Lasting, transformative change is only possible when we decide for ourselves we want to change. No friend, spouse, therapist, or life coach can do that for us. We have to make the choice to challenge what we believe, and if the evidence says we're wrong, we have to find the courage to admit it and change our beliefs. Personal development is about progress. Progress requires change. At Our2Brains, our process of becoming a whole-mind thinker starts with one fundamental principle: Only you can change yourself. The power to change is within all of us. We just need the self-awareness, humility and courage to unlock it. - T.J. To receive updates from our blog, please subscribe to our RSS feed or send us an email if you'd like to join our email list. You can also follow us on social media by clicking the links in the sidebar. The two hemispheres of our brains serve very different functions. I'm not talking about the conventional characterizations of the "logical" left brain or the "creative" right brain. Recent neuroscience research reveals that each brain hemisphere actually operates separately to formulate its own version of the world. Let's dig in a little deeper to understand how our two brains create for us two different versions of reality.
LEFT BRAIN: The left brain processes things. It wants certainty. It focuses narrowly on the bits and pieces of information it takes in and attempts to weave it all together as a whole. Tools, machines, codes, numbers, letters. These are the specialty of the left brain. It is prone to bureaucracy because it prioritizes the need to for control. It favors abstraction, anonymity, organizability and predictability. RIGHT BRAIN: The right brain understands things. It wants meaning. It focuses on building "the big picture." Nature, love, art, metaphor, spirituality. These are the speciality of the right brain. Whereas the left brain is smart, the right brain is wise. It favors what is individual, unique, embodied and fluid. Now, think about your job. Which of your two brains do you use most? Which brain gets the job done? Which brain is more likely to get you the promotion you always wanted? Which brain does your employer value more? When I think about every job I've ever had, the answer is: the left brain. Psychologist Iain McGilchrist, co-author of Divided World, Divided Brain, has this to say about how the two hemispheres operate: "The left brain focuses on details at the expense of the bigger picture, and on procedures at the expense of meaning." He goes on to say that the right brain "takes into account more and better integrated information over a broader range" and therefore "sees more" than the left. In essence, McGilchrist observes, the right brain's thinking "is more accurate, more down to earth -- in a word, 'truer' to what is." Here's a blog post that features a nice summary of McGilchrist's groundbreaking ideas. At Our2Brains, we think the left hemisphere's 'way of being' has become more culturally dominant than the right hemisphere's. This imbalance manifests itself in the way we connect to our work. We're mostly task and results-oriented. Productivity is prioritized over purpose. For many professionals, this superficial connection to their work is insufficient for finding fulfillment from their work. Their right brain is yearning for a sense of meaning, but it takes a backseat to the demands of a left-brained world. We think the right brain should have a seat at the table. Our goal is to help people become more aware of their divided brain and equip them with practical tools and resources to achieve better brain balance through synergistic, whole-mind thinking. If you're looking for a deeper connection to your work, and ultimately your world, we invite you to contact us and click the links in the sidebar to find and follow us on social media. - T.J. In 2001, I met fellow Our2Brains co-founder, Dustin Flatt, when we served together in the U.S. Army in Germany. For four years, we adventured all across Europe and the Middle East. During our travels and combat deployments, we gained many new perspectives on the human experience. We witnessed some of the best, and worst, of humanity. Our lifelong friendship was built on a shared desire to do something to help our fellow humans do better. For ourselves. For our families. For our nation. For the future of our world. When we left the military, we committed ourselves to finding meaningful work that would allow us to make a difference in the cause of human progress. I held various leadership in both the private and public sectors and was most fulfilled by mentoring my team members to achieve their professional and personal goals. Dustin became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and provided mental health services to people in need. Along the way, we learned the best outcomes for people come when they figure out how to leverage the full power and potential of their whole mind. Balanced, synergistic, healthy minds are capable of positive change and action. So we're taking our experiences and embarking on a new adventure. We created Our2Brains as a personal development consulting service aimed at helping people understand and apply our concept of whole-mind thinking to meet their individual and organizational goals, make a positive impact within their professions, and advance the cause of collective human progress. Our concept of whole-mind thinking is based on lessons learned through our educational backgrounds and professional experiences in leadership, mental health services, and social advocacy. Here is a source document from Jonathan Rowson and Iain McGilchrist, two leading researchers in the relatively nascent field of hemispheric neuroscience. Their work is an inspiration for our concept of whole-mind thinking. They discuss our divided brains and how understanding the relationship between the brain's two hemispheres has practical applications for improving performance and mental health at the individual and societal levels. This website and company were created as part of a Spring 2021 project for COMSTRAT 563 Professional Digital Content Promotion in the Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, where I'm pursuing a Masters degree in Strategic Communication. Although the company is fictional, we're working to make Our2Brains become a reality. I hope you'll follow along as this project progresses throughout the semester. - T.J. |
AuthorT.J. Westphal is a co-founder of Our2Brains. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Strategic Communication from the Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. ArchivesCategories |