About Your Brain at Work (from Amazon):
A researcher and consultant burrows deep inside the heads of one modern two-career couple to examine how each partner processes the workday—revealing how a more nuanced understanding of the brain can allow us to better organize, prioritize, recall, and sort our daily lives.
Emily and Paul are the parents of two young children, and professionals with different careers. Emily is the newly promoted vice president of marketing at a large corporation; Paul works from home or from clients’ offices as an independent IT consultant. Their days are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.
In Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock goes inside Emily and Paul’s brains to see how they function as each attempts to sort, prioritize, organize, and act on the vast quantities of information they receive in one typical day. Dr. Rock is an expert on how the brain functions in a work setting. By analyzing what is going on in their heads, he offers solutions Emily and Paul (and all of us) can use to survive and thrive in today’s hyperbusy work environment—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.
In Your Brain at Work, Dr. Rock explores issues such as:
- why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources
- why it’s so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
- how to maximize the chance of finding insights to solve seemingly insurmountable problems
- how to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible
- how to collaborate more effectively with others
- why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier
- how to be more effective at changing other people’s behavior and much more
My Video Book Review:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This is my second video book review.
Today, we were looking at Your Brain at Work by Dr. David Rock. Again, if you’re following me on Twitter or LinkedIn, you probably saw a number of posts that I shared with quotes from the book. So as I was reading it, I was underlining things, and then I would highlight some of the quotes on social media. ..the things that kind of stood out to me .
The author sets out to help readers understand the complicated inner workings of our brain and what causes us to behave in the ways that we do. So that’s the intention of the book. You know, the idea is that the more in tune we are with what’s going on in our brain, what’s causing our stress, our distractedness, our defensiveness, our, you know, whatever those things are that the, the challenges that we’re facing throughout the day or when we’re making decisions then the, the more prepared we are to approach the situations differently and affect better results.
So I’ll be honest. There were definitely parts of the book that were very complicated for me. So when it got …whenever he would get technical in using scientific terminology: prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, the limbic system, things like that… I wasn’t a science major for a reason. So there was definitely a challenge for me in absorbing parts of the book, but he he really presents it in a, in a way for different, I think for different people to be able to absorb the information in different ways.
So he starts every chapter with a story. We have two characters that we follow through their day throughout the book. It’s a husband and wife couple, so it’s, you know, we start with them at home. And then as they each go off to work, the situations that they deal with at work, and then when they come back home at the end of the day.
And so we, you know, basically any, anything, anyone with a job can, can relate to some of the scenarios that are happening. And he starts the chapter with a story. So, you know, some sort of situation, a meeting that doesn’t go well. And you know, you, you read the story and then he breaks and goes into the, the more scientific explanation, bringing in studies that, you know, talk about what’s happening with the brain.
And then wrapping up the chapter with now that we understand what’s happening with the brain, none of the character understands what’s going on for them, how they, how they approach the entire scenario differently and how they had a different outcome because of that. And so it helps understand, you know, how to apply what you’re learning about the brain in your own situations, when you can kind of apply that to yourself.
So I think that the way he laid it out was, was great. It was very easy to digest, you know, minus the more technical parts for me. I think that for me, I will need to go back and reread certain parts of the book to try to understand it better and to apply it. So that’s the one thing is that I think if you read it, you definitely want to make sure that you’re in a space where you can focus on the book, study it, you know, study what you’re learning and you know, be able to think through applying what you’re learning because I think it really will take that focused attention on, on the content of the book in order to actually apply it in real life.
But absolutely fascinating book. I would definitely recommend it if it’s a topic that is of interest to you.