In other words, dynamic stability equals a combination of expectation and experience multiplied by positive attention density multiplied by veto power. Dynamic stability is another way of saying “positive change,” change that allows a system to adapt and develop, rather than remaining inflexible and unable to respond, and to do this without becoming overwhelmed by chaos.

For most of the 20th century, assumptions of mechanistic science, added to limitations on observing the inner workings of live brains, led to several conclusions:

Attachment research established the importance of a secure relationship between a child and a parent. Not having that security was correlated with a number of mental health problems, including difficulty in establishing a secure relationship with one’s own children. But in his book The Developing Mind, Daniel Siegel (1999) reported research showing exceptions. Some parents whose insecure attachments had been identified when they were children ended up as adults being able to establish secure relationships with their children. This was very different from what should have been true based on the assumption that adult brain structure is immutable. Furthermore, psychotherapists were discovering treatments that at least relieved the symptoms of trauma, despite the belief that traumatic experiences created untreatable brain damage.

In a compelling series of stories, Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley (2002; Begley, 2007) describe more direct evidence of brain plasticity. Edward Taub showed that monkeys’ brains are able to rewire and return function to a limb whose nerves had been severed. Michael Merzenich and his colleagues applied this finding to helping human stroke victims regain function. Fred Gage and others discovered not only that adult brains can form new neurons but that this is possible at least into the eighth decade of life.

As a result, it is clear that our brains can grow to an extent never thought possible even 30 years ago. But questions remain.

We examine these and other questions under the next headings:

Systems in dynamic stability develop over time by becoming more complex. A child’s first steps may be awkward, but over time her brain and body develop so that she can execute complex ballet or hip-hop moves. A child’s brain may be subject to pruning, but the remaining neurons form complex networks of connections stimulated by the changing environment, especially social interactions. An organization that manages to survive through difficulties usually does so by developing complex skills and systems that enable it to meet future challenges more easily. Through dynamic stability, a skilled athlete or math expert develops abilities that can be nothing less than amazing.

Robert Coghill is a scientist who studies pain and its representation in the brain. At the First Global NeuroLeadership Summit, Coghill (2007) reported that pain triggered by the same outside event was experienced quite uniquely by different people. This finding has implications for how people’s mental processes work. The objectively identical pain stimulus (e.g., heat) can be “felt” or rated by some people as 1.5 on a 10-point scale and by others as 8.5 on the same scale. This is not a matter of some people reporting less experienced pain just to appear brave or others reporting greater pain as a dramatic gesture. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that indirectly measure changes in cerebral blood flow, different reported pain levels were correlated with different cortical activity. So people who reported pain of 1.5 actually had a different measure of brain activity from people who reported pain of 8.5.

But why is this work relevant to a gathering of coaches and business leaders? Coghill explained that listeners could replace the word “pain” in his studies with the word “information.” We have already defined information as output that tells us about input as well as the process involved in conveying the input.

As we argued earlier, information that comes from a painful stimulus is not delivered by our sensory apparatus bare and unadorned by our minds. Rather, the painful output that registers in our consciousness tells us not only about the original input or stimulus but also about the mechanism and process that regulates that flow of information. Coghill’s research indicates that the parts of the brain that are most active in regulating our unique perception of pain are the “higher levels,” which include past history, present context, and future implications.

As for what pain research can tell us about expectations, Coghill developed an “expectation paradigm” in which subjects learned to expect a mildly painful heat stimulus after a short time interval, a medium stimulus after a middle time interval, and a severely painful stimulus after a long interval:

After enough trials that people knew what to expect, Coghill varied the stimulus, sometimes delivering a severely painful stimulus after only a short interval. That is, people expected a mild pain but received a severe one. The results were surprising. Not only did the subjects report experiencing less pain than when the severe stimulus was delivered after the expected long interval, their brain activity was similar to what occurred when they actually received a mild stimulus. The fMRI measures showed similar brain activity when people expected a mild pain but received a severe one as compared to when they both expected and received a mild pain. To put it another way, when people expected a weak pain but received a severe one, they experienced the pain as weak.

The difference is significant. It is comparable to the pain relief experienced when a person is given a shot of morphine. Conclusion: Expectation alters our experience of pain. And, more generally, mental activity alters whether we experience incoming information as positive or negative. Coghill suggested that he had discovered the brain traces of the placebo effect, the well-established tendency for a person’s expectations about treatment to affect his or her recovery. In psychotherapy, for example, Hubble, Duncan, and Miller (1999) marshal evidence that approximately 15% of variance in psychotherapy outcome is attributable to the placebo effect.

But expectation is not the whole story behind the placebo effect. Coghill’s experiment does not work the other way. People who expect a severely painful stimulus but receive a mild one report the pain as mild. Coghill explains this as the interaction of desire and expectation: We want a mild stimulus. Our expectations of what is severe are tempered by the desire for mild, with the result that we perceive mild as mild, even when we expect severe. This may be an example of confirmation bias, or ignoring negative information that does not suit our purposes. We are more likely to pay attention to information that matches our intentions.

Coghill’s studies support his claim that we are constantly constructing expectations and intentions and then testing them against incoming sensory data. That is, neither experience nor expectations alone account for phenomena like the placebo effect. It is the combination of expectation and experience that creates an important element in managing the human system that makes up our existence.

Adele signed her first consulting contract with her former agency the week after she retired. By clarifying her intention, she became more likely to notice opportunities that matched what she wanted. Then, by activating her positive memories of a similar change in the past, she shaped an expectation that helped her bypass negative or discouraging feedback. Even if she got a painful response to her inquiries, she experienced it as a mild setback because of her positive expectations. As Coghill suggested in his NeuroLeadership Summit presentation (2007), “Change through aspiration is more effective than change through desperation.”

However, Coghill also warns us that our ability to think our way to positive experiences is limited. Believable expectations can alter reality (such as objectively measured painful stimuli), but when our expectations cross into unbelievable territory, the effect breaks down. By expecting a mildly hot stimulus, we may be able to experience a hotter stimulus as being mild, but only if the stimulus is not so hot as to cause physical damage. Expecting a truck to go around us when we stand in front of it is not likely to result in a positive experience. However, there is a large territory within which coaching our expectations effectively changes our experience and resulting maps of the world.

But human capacity to make this shift raises other problems: What if we react automatically, either because of implicit or explicitly practiced hardwiring, and that reaction is no longer appropriate in a new situation? Consider the experience of the new chief executive officer (CEO) of a resources company who wanted managers to offer their ideas about new processes and markets. But the managers had been trained by the previous command-and-control CEO to keep their ideas to themselves. The new CEO could not understand why brainstorming sessions were more like funerals. Issues like this are frequent challenges for leaders and are common fare for coaches. Understanding techniques for encouraging and guiding such changes requires recognizing how expectations fit into the larger picture of the brain and mind.

The collaboration of Jeffrey Schwartz with physicist Henry Stapp (Schwartz, Stapp, & Beauregard, 2004) has provided the foundation for our recognition of the importance of the systemic paradigm for both coaching and neuroscience. Schwartz (Rock & Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz & Begley, 2002; see also Stapp, 2007) explains that, in order to communicate with one another, the neurons in the brain require individual chemical ions to travel across channels that are, at some points, not much more than an ion wide. Ions are atoms or molecules that have an electric charge because they have either gained or lost an electron. According to quantum physics, this makes the brain a quantum environment subject to the laws that apply at this subatomic level. One of those laws is this: The questions you ask influence the results you see.

Applying this to the quantum brain, asking one question rather than another, or focusing our attention on one item or another, influences the connections the brain makes and “profoundly alters the patterns and timings of the connections the brain generates in each fraction of a second” (Rock & Schwartz, 2006, p. 36). Applying this concept to the principle of change, if we shine our spotlight on something new that represents the change we wish to make, our brain makes new connections. This is not just a theoretical possibility: That the brain makes new connections in this way “has shown to be true through studies of neuroplasticity, where focused attention plays a critical role in creating physical changes in the brain” (Rock & Schwartz, 2006, p. 36).

We have discussed the research by Fred Gage and others (Eriksson et al., 1998; Olson et al., 2006; van Praag et al., 2005) showing that the adult brain changes in response to stimulating environments and voluntary exercise. Schwartz (Schwartz & Begley, 2002) extended this in his psychiatric practice to people suffering from OCD. Remember that this is a very troubling affliction that its victims experience as having no control over. A popular depiction of this disorder is the detective Monk in the television series of the same name. The lead character, played by actor Tony Shalub, uses his obsession with detail to solve crimes.

Schwartz trained OCD patients to become mindful of their compulsive impulses and to attribute these to false messages from the brain’s error-detection systems. When they experienced an impulse, for example, to wash their hands after having just done so, Schwartz helped them say to themselves, “This is not a signal of danger, this is just my brain sending a mistaken signal.” They then practiced choosing to do something else, for instance playing the piano or watering their plants. After just two weeks of training in this method, not only did the patients report behavioral change, Schwartz was able to see systematic changes in neural structure in positron emission tomography scans of the patients’ brains. This is an example of what Schwartz calls “self-directed neuroplasticity,” the very term he also applies to coaching.

Schwartz (Schwartz & Begley, 2002) points out that, at the molecular level, repeated observation holds a molecule in place, slowing the rate of fluctuation it exhibits when unobserved. Some scientists do not believe this effect is applicable to phenomena of the human brain, but if we accept, as Stapp and Schwartz do (Schwartz et al., 2004; Stapp, 2007) that the brain is a quantum environment, then our ability to focus our attention on newly connecting brain circuits should eventually hardwire them. That is, by choosing what to shine the spotlight of attention on, we can effect changes in the very structure of our brain.

The key word to take note of in the description in the last paragraph is “repeated.” Focusing once on a new connection, say, remembering the name of a new employee, will not hold in place the brain circuit that represents that information and create an instant map. We must manage the flow of energy such that we pay intense attention to the change we want to make, and we must do it over and over. If our working memory gets exhausted or overwhelmed or distracted, we simply repeat the effort of paying attention as soon and as often as we are able. Rock and Schwartz state this concept in this way: “It is Attention Density that brings Quantum Zeno Effect into play and causes the proper brain circuitry to be held in place in a stable dynamic way” (2006, p. 37). When we pay sufficient attention to certain patterns over time, they become part of who we are and how we perceive the world.

It follows, then, that what we pay attention to is crucially important. If we pay attention to the problem or to the negative qualities of a situation or person, that is what will become hardwired. If we rehearse in our minds how embarrassed we will be if we do not remember the new employee’s name, what result can we expect?

Quality of Focus. The number of other circuits that are activated in connection to the original circuit and the amount of energy coursing through that circuit comprise quality of attention. For example, you will generate more energy if you have an emotional reaction to a topic.

Questions are more powerful the more that they increase attention density. For example, a coach may ask, “What did your boss tell you in your performance review?” Auditory memory circuits are likely activated, along with a visual picture of the scene, memories of whatever emotional reaction the client had, and an inner rehearsal of what might be said in response.

If, however, the coach asks, “What went well in your performance review?” the client has a much broader series of circuits to choose from: all those from the previous question, but additionally overall evaluation of the effects of the interaction, comparison with other performance reviews and other times when the client was evaluated, hopes and fears going into the review, reactions afterward, conclusions, questions. As a result, the client’s attention is held longer, more richly, and more positively.

Quantity of Focus. This is the number of times focus is directed to the desired circuit. If the coach made a request and the client agreed to journal about the review and her insights from coaching, more circuits would be involved and held active for even longer. The client would have to spend time summoning memories, conclusions, comparisons, insights, and emotional reactions and putting these into writing. This might take several sessions. If the coach asks her about her journal experience at the next session, the focus is repeated. This increases the client’s focus on lessons to be derived from coaching around her performance review from perhaps several hours or days to possibly weeks and months. That focus is now also linked to many more centers of her brain. Both the quantity and the quality of attention have gone up, as many more circuits were activated many more times.

The quality and quantity of attention determine the strength of connections in our brain. But to achieve dynamic stability, it matters what we pay attention to. Remember that we get more of what we pay attention to. To pay constant attention to fears, regrets, worries, or vengeful thoughts means that we will increase these undesirable aspects in our lives. Eventually, we may have trouble avoiding one or the other of disintegration or rigidity, the two shoals between which dynamic stability flows. This is as true for organizations as it is for individuals. The plus (+) sign in the dynamic stability formula is a reminder to focus on strengths such as the ones we discuss in chapter 11 on positive psychology (Seligman, 2002).

But let us examine the final element in the formula for dynamic stability.

As Schwartz et al. (2004) argue, quantum discoveries have breathed new life into previously discarded concepts, such as those of William James. Will power or volition was a topic of debate among philosophers and early psychologists such as James. Both psychoanalysis and behaviorism ignored volition in the interest of promoting unconscious drives and stimulus response, respectively, as explanatory models. But quantum discoveries have revived the question of whether the subjectively experiencing person can exert free will or whether she or he is at the deterministic mercy of environment or heredity (or of seemingly intractable disorders such as OCD).

Subjectively, we have the experience of sitting at a desk and then, without any sense of being “made” to do so, voluntarily “deciding” to take a sip of tea. This feels like free will. However, many of our behaviors, such as shopping selections, can be predicted so well that there is a science of product placement. Can neuroscience help to reconcile this experience of free choice with decades of evidence that behavior can be controlled?

Neuroscientists Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl (1983) came up with good news and bad news regarding free will.

Bad News. They found that the brain generates a signal, a “readiness potential,” to pick up our teacup about five-tenths of a second before we actually pick up the cup. We are not conscious of this signal until about three-tenths of a second later. The bad news is that if we define free will as the ability to consciously generate readiness potentials, we don’t have it. In chapter 13, we discuss the fact that the brain is constantly in processing mode. The subjective manifestation is that thoughts are constantly appearing and disappearing. Some of those thoughts have to do with “voluntary” actions. We do not voluntarily think these up, as we do not even become aware of them until three-tenths of a second after they register on instruments in the lab. So we do not freely will our options for action to appear in our brains.

Good News. But that is not the whole story. There is a lag of about two-tenths of a second between the time we become aware of a readiness potential and our taking the unconsciously proposed action.

The sequence is this:

It is in that gap of two-tenths of a second between awareness and action that we can decide not to do what we have unconsciously generated as an option for action. We can decide not to reach for the teacup or make a snide remark or cut another piece of cake. Schwartz and Begley (2002) call this “veto power.” We do not have free will when it comes to voluntarily creating our brain’s readiness potential, but we have “free won’t” when it comes to performing the acts that we become aware of.

As part of his treatment, Schwartz helps his OCD patients recognize the signal to wash their hands or check the lock as coming from their brain, not from danger “out there.” This is an example of input not about the outside world but about the functioning of the brain system itself. Patients learn to recognize this and to use the two-tenths of a second after becoming aware of the faulty brain signal to veto it. They can choose instead to do something else. In doing some other desirable action, they are creating new maps and recruiting the principle of neural Darwinism to, eventually, reduce the strength of the old compulsion.

However, every time we exercise veto power and do something other than the habit we are attempting to break, the more we reinforce alternative actions. Schwartz and Begley (2002) recognize the immense courage and energy this takes, but Schwartz knows it is possible because of his successful treatment of OCD patients. Discovering that people can do something other than wash their hands (again) or check to see if the door is locked (again) is why, when David explained coaching to him, Schwartz called it “self-directed neuroplasticity.”

How else can we increase the probability that a person’s insight from a coaching session will end up becoming reliably hardwired? All the techniques that coaches learn to help clients be accountable to themselves apply here: journaling about insights, setting up physical reminders, celebrating small victories, exercising “veto power” when the old pattern emerges, and so forth.

But that is not all. We do need to recognize that our working memory, the equipment that turns on and focuses our attention, is limited and vulnerable to internal and external distractions, as we discussed earlier. That is, our individual minds have these limitations. By “borrowing” the attention power of other minds, we can extend our capacity for attention density enormously. After all, that is surely a major ingredient in the success of coaching. The coach has the responsibility to, first, make sure the client is paying attention to what is positive—his or her strengths, what has worked well in the past, the upside of the problem. Second, the coach steadies the spotlight on the intended change, not by issuing orders but by asking questions that will direct the client’s attention to the brain circuits to be hardwired. In this way, the relationship with the coach supports attention density.

Dynamic stability may be enhanced by a combination of expectation and experience. Our expectations can have a substantial and measurable effect on our experience. The dynamic, or changeful, aspect of dynamic stability is made possible by neuroplasticity, or the fact that experience can change the brain. Positive experiences are more likely to be system sustaining. More specifically for changes we consciously desire, if the Quantum Zeno Effect holds true, it is attention that changes the brain. Because the brain is a social organ, dynamic stability will be enhanced by relationships that are also positive and dynamically stable.

The formula for attaining dynamic stability of human systems is to add expectation for our desired outcome to experience, multiply that by quantity and quality of positive attention, and multiply that by saying no to those impulses that either lead us to repeat what has not worked or to do something other than what we have determined will work.

Over time, refocusing our attention on the combination of positive expectations and corroborating experience while practicing veto power over and over will produce new mental habits and new hardwiring.

Capacities such as brain/body regulation, fear modulation, and emotion balancing are generally associated with the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, which we mentioned as part of our brain-in-the-hand model. The PFC is located behind the hard bone of our forehead and behind our eyes. Different areas of the PFC seem to perform tasks similar to an orchestra conductor: integrating, coordinating, and modulating energy and information that come from all parts of the brain. However, we must remember that, as with an orchestra conductor, the PFC does not itself produce the energy and information. The whole brain/body is required for that.

Our brains consist of neurons and their innumerable connections, plus other cells and substances such as neurotransmitters. This system makes it possible for us to gather information from “out there,” beyond our brain/body; to coordinate our different brain/body functions; to participate in sharing information; and to link past, present, and future. The capacity to predict the future not only means we can act rather than react, but, as quantum physics suggests, the very nature of that action can actually shape the future.

Three specific guides are particularly relevant to the question “How can we be healthy?” Keeping the brain in mind helps coaches:

Asking how we can change and do better begs a consideration of why we do what we do in the first place. This is the question we consider in part III.