Here’s how to achieve your goals

“How you see yourself determines what you see for yourself.” – Veli Ndaba, The Engineered Mind – to LEAD.

My personal story of having been plunged into mental darkness by my family members’ tragic loss inspired me to search for the light and it is this personal experience that I am sharing with everyone.

I am using it as a vehicle to apply this discipline of neuroscience and engineering to bring in leadership mental light.

The vehicle I’m using to drive this is the ‘Veli Ndaba Neuro Engineering Leadership Effect’ – #VNNLE. Let me share this one example of how I apply this technique in goal-setting.

Scientists think goal-setting works by assisting the frontal lobes. As supervisors, the frontal lobes are responsible for reasoning and planning.

Concentrating on a specific goal allows the brain to bring structure to chaos and keeps the amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain – in check. To bypass the amygdala, you must apply what I call the SSS technique – small simple steps. This is when you break a big task into small manageable chunks and there’s science behind this.

The amygdala, which is the fear control centre in the brain, is the one that is in charge of pushing the emergency button for fight, flight or freeze. Anything that it considers threatening, it acts.

So, the science behind breaking a big task into smaller manageable tasks is to bypass the amygdala. When you present it with something so small that is non-threatening, it allows you to do it. It doesn’t push the panic button, that’s how you bypass it.

If you just present it with a big goal that it doesn’t have a clue on how it will achieve, all it sees is failure signs all over it and it pushes the panic button and brings every good intended action to a complete stop!