I do love reading – and the break between Christmas and New Year provides a wonderful opportunity to indulge, because emails are slow to arrive at this point in the cadence of the annual cycle, and rarely demand instant responses. Amongst the number of books into which I have immersed myself over these past few days, one in particular made me smile with intriguement and interest – Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’. I may be rather slow to the party on this book, as it was published in 2020, but books are books, and thoughts are thoughts, and once exposed to the world, they can be picked up at any moment, and appreciated for what they are. While it is true that the science of the brain is constantly evolving, the ideas in Feldman Barrett’s book resonated strongly with me as commonsense, based on what I have observed over several years in working with leaders, and they therefore (to my mind, at least!) merit sharing and amplifying.
Anyway, what a very readable and stimulating book this was … and if you haven’t yet read it, it won’t take you long, as it is short, sharp and crisp. Its main message is that even the advanced and sophisticated areas of our brain – the sections we think have outgrown our pre-stone age ancestors – are not actually primarily designed for thinking, reasoning or even feeling, but for something far more fundamental and pragmatic: every single part of the brain is actually designed to keep the body alive, by managing its energy resources. This is quite a comforting thought, actually, when you think about it; it is good to have our brain in our corner, for sure. The author describes the brain as a predictive organ, constantly anticipating what the body will need next and adjusting systems accordingly in order to keep us “in budget”. Thoughts, emotions, memories and decisions are not therefore separate ‘modules’ that switch on in response to the world; they are actually the brain’s best guesses, built from past experience, and are specifically designed to help the body prepare for what comes next – all in service of keeping us alive and well.
From this perspective (built, obviously, on thorough neuroscience research, albeit much debated globally), our emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but, more accurately, constructions the brain creates to regulate our internal systems efficiently. It is a deceptively simple idea, but one that brings quite an important lens to many of the assumptions we hold as human beings (and leaders) about rationality, emotion and choice … we do know, for example, that we can change our behaviours if we work on them, but we also know that this is hard to do; a logical step forward in Feldman Barrett’s direction of thought might take us to an even more extreme point, where we recognise that if we want to change what we do, we might have to go a lot deeper than just 10,000 hours of practice. Brain-body connection in practice … we have been talking about holistic education for years, and perhaps we should congratulate ourselves on our perceptiveness (even if there is still a long way to go to translate this into genuine practice).
I loved one chapter in particular – Chapter 5, which explores the way our brains talk to one another, to use the author’s words, “in secret”: a delicious thought … just think about what is going on when you next meet someone or think about them! Feldman Barrett describes how our nervous systems are constantly influencing those around us, below the level of conscious awareness – through facial expressions, tone, posture and micro-movements that shape each other’s bodily budgets. We are, in this sense, biologically interdependent; my calm can help regulate yours, and my anxiety can just as easily deplete your resources. This landed powerfully for me when I reflect on leadership, teams and schools, where we often overestimate the importance of words and underestimate the quiet physiological signals we send all day long. If brains are budgeting organs, then leadership is not simply about direction or decision-making, but about the collective conditions we create for one another to function well.
That is a call to action, if ever I heard one … we definitely aren’t in this alone as leaders, and we might just need to take a few moments (or longer) to consider what this might mean for how we engage all of our teams in ways that actively support one another’s capacity to think, to cope and to flourish. Each of us, it turns out, has a shared responsibility for one another’s wellbeing and effectiveness. And the more clearly we understand this, and the more explicit we can be with those around us about it, the more likely it is that we will be able to harness this knowledge to unite our amazing brains in a concerted effort to keep us all well, thriving, and contributing to the safe future of the world.
So … Happy New Year! May 2026 be fruitful, thoughtful and engaging, and take us all forward, together!
