A long line of research shows that deep in the middle of our brains is the part that’s been around since human beings began to have brains. It’s the limbic system, and since it’s so similar to the basic brain of a lizard, it’s sometimes called your ‘lizard brain.’
We all have an inner brain that’s much like a lizard’s.
It operates your bodily functions, and it also gives you your basic emotions like fear.
Fear can be a life-saving emotion, when it serves its purpose. But it can also be irrational. If ever there was a source where negative thinking comes from, this is it. It’s the reason people fear change, get nervous, shun risk, and hate things.
According to author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, it might also be what right now is killing your creative powers and potential.
“When you were a kid, beautiful art – questions, curiosity, and spontaneity poured out of you,” Seth Godin writes in his bestseller, Lynchpin. But then the lizard brain got trained to obey rules, toe the line, and fit in. This ‘obedient’ lizard brain evolved into what Godin calls “the resistance.” And today, once the resistance takes over, “the art each of us is capable of creating is relentlessly whittled away.”
The resistance is more than just the usual notion of resistance to change. It’s your own internal resistance to change, the habits of conformity that started in school. In fact, “the resistance loves school,” Godin writes, “… if school is about obedience, then you can be soothed by thinking that more obedience is better works.”
Through your education’s “well-organized, but toxic rules at school, the resistance gained in strength,” he says. The rules may have created order but killed creativity: “Do you think it’s an accident that the powers that be wanted the disobedient and creative part of your brain to sit down and shut up?”
The resistance thus got trained, but unlike the resistance training you can do in a gym, this kind was not good for you. This training builds up a person’s resistance to change, and it can kill creativity – your creativity.
The problem can also be the lizard brain of those around you. “You work with people who are totally at the mercy of the resistance,” Godin argues. This is why good, new ideas often get shot down so fast. “The resistance is so tenacious that it encourages you to speak up and drag down anyone around you with the temerity to dream.”
So how about you? What’s your lizard brain doing? Is it trying to drag down someone around you with the temerity to dream? Or are you that person with the temerity to dream, and is your own resistance standing in the way?
