Are you using the right brain for that?

(Time to read: 3-4 minutes)

I love to live in flow. When I’m feeling fully alive, and one activity just flows smoothly and naturally into the next.

I’ve discovered that this is a right-brain state. And that being on time for meetings is a left-brain task.

My right brain operates in a timeless, limitless universe. Only my left brain has an awareness of time, boundaries, and limits.

What this means for Spacious Balance

In trying to get to meetings on time, or to limit the number of projects to a number I can actually accomplish, I’ve been trying to use the wrong brain – which is to say, my right brain.

I need to use my left brain to help me with those tasks.

Which means that I have to find a way to help my right brain be okay with what my left brain tells me I need to do.

Getting to Meetings on Time

First I had to figure out how long it actually takes me to prepare and travel to each type of appointment. So I had my left brain keep track of when I started to get ready for each meeting, and what time it was when I was actually fully “there”.

FYI – This gave me quite a different number compared to the difference between when I started to get ready for the meeting and when it was scheduled to start! 🙂

Then I set a series of timers. This is a very left-brain thing to do, and something that I resisted for a long time – telling myself I “shouldn’t” need a timer.

Somehow knowing that my right brain is both the source of much of the fun in my life, and that it has no sense of time, made it “okay” for me to use timers to help it stay connected to the passage of time.

It was clearly a much more satisfying choice to continue to live most of my life in my right brain, with my left brain stepping in only to set the timers, than to have my left brain watching over my shoulder all the time…

So I set two “left-brain” timers for each meeting. One is for the actual meeting start time (to help me notice if I was on time, or if I might need to do some timer adjustments). The other is for the time that I have learned I need to start to prepare and travel to the meeting.

But I knew from past experience that I don’t actually stop working and start preparing when that second timer goes off.

Learning from Focusing

So I took a piece of learning I’ve gotten from my Focusing training. At the beginning of a Focusing session, the Companion asks the Focuser how many minutes signal they would like before the end of the session.

It takes me about two minutes to complete the “coming out” process.

So I request two signals – one at two minutes before the end, and another one four minutes before the end. This four-minute signal lets my right brain know that it will soon be time to start coming to a close, while allowing for any last messages that might want to come before the end.

It took some experimenting to discover that this is the right amount of “heads up” time that works for me, given the length of Focusing sessions I’ve been having. (I suspect that I might ask for a five-minute signal if / as I start having longer Focusing sessions.)

My Right-Brain Timer(s)

I’m still discovering what is the “right” amount of signal time for my right brain, that lets it gently and smoothly transition out of one task and into getting ready for a meeting. There seem to be two factors that affect it:

1. How long the prep-and-travel-time is – the longer it is, the longer the advance notice I seem to need, and the more signal reminders seem to be helpful. I think this is because my right brain just can’t believe that it can actually take me 1 1/2 hours to get ready for certain kinds of appointments. So it needs lots of time and reminders to ease into that.
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2. The nature of the task that I’m doing just before the meeting. The more right-brained it is (e.g., creative work like writing articles, designing courses, or working on one of my websites), the more time and reminders I need, to enable me to ease out of the task smoothly – so it is not jarring.

What about your right brain?

Are there places that you’ve been trying to get your right brain to take on functions that it is just not designed to do?

Do you have any thoughts on how to use the “right” (correct) brain for those functions?

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