Monologues 80-95%; Dialogues 5-20%

Those of you who have been reading my blogs the past 10 years know I do not use studies that do not employ scientific methods and peer-reviewed. In an alarming new finding by neuroscientists, it turns out that our brain is processing experiences via monologues (self talk, self analysis, self judgment) about 80-95% of the time. The rest is time spent in human interaction and dialogue, in person or electronically (connecting with others). The latter can be 2-way (actual back and forth communication) or 1-way (reading social/other media). These monologues continue while we sleep too. I proceeded to google search training resources on how to help people communicate (dialogue) with others. Millions of resources came up, quite literally, from how to communicate with children, with spouses, in sales, at work, in presentations …. endless. I found hardly any on how to communicate with yourself, how to conduct monologues so that they are the kind that are productive, nurturing, critical and growth oriented. In other words, we have resources for about 5-20% of what our brain consciously does and not the 80-95% of what it does subconsciously. For high performers, leaders, athletes, and coaches, consider learning/teaching to conduct healthy monologues, a game-changer.

Workday Emotional Fatigue

Human error is a leading cause of death in healthcare. Some studies show about 200 deaths in the US per day because of medical errors, though it is not clear how many of them are caused by good clinicians who make the wrong decision versus other types of medical errors. I wrote a book (Healthcare EQ) inventorying the ’emotional cost’ to the clinician of each patient interaction labeling ’emotional fatigue’ as a cause in performing sub-optimally. If you run every single red traffic light on your way to work, it could be deduced that you would show up to work a little more ’emotionally exhausted’ than if you hit all green traffic lights on the same route. Extending this example to patient interaction, if patients seen earlier in the day require more emotionally, it could also be deduced that patients in the afternoon might see a more fatigued clinician. We captured some of this first hand in the book. It led to a meme that asked,”What time did you leave work?” with the answer being “5PM is when I drove home but 2PM is when I emotionally quit.” I see this in athletes too. If an adverse event occurs at a point in the competition, it is hard for some athletes to recover and they ’emotionally quit’ before the game is over. Traditional workplace is no different.