The Brain Science Behind Why It Works

As the Blueprint of WE Collaboration Document has spread around the world, it's been fascinating to see how deeply impactful it has been in every type of relationship situation imaginable.

But why?

Why does creating a Blueprint of WE Collaboration Document, as the foundation of a relationship, change the very nature of the relationship and the way people show up with one another on a daily basis? Why do you find yourself having far fewer stressful thoughts, less anxiety and more resilience?

It’s the Way Our Brains Work
The more neuroscience research we pour over, the more we see how creating a Blueprint of WE Collaboration Document impacts the stories that live in our minds; the ones that cause us to judge ourselves and others, or inspire ourselves and others.

Our brain is the moderator of our relationships. It enables us to see others and ourselves through the veil of contentment or distress.

The adult brain weighs about three pounds. These three pounds allow us to walk and talk; to laugh, cry and touch; to love, hate, create or destroy. Everything we do, everything we think, everything we feel, every wish, dream and regret is mediated by our brain. Our brain guides us through our lives. By sensing the world around us, storing some fragment of each unique moment, cataloguing, sorting, organizing and acting on our experiences, our brain defines us. It is the brain that allows us to be connected to each other in the present. It is the brain that links us to the past as our language, religion, economies, technologies – essentially all of our cultural practices - reflect the distilled experiences of thousands of generations of our ancestors. And it is the brain that connects us to the future as we pass elements of our life experience to the next generations. It is the brain that allowed humankind to create humanity. (Neurological Bases of Behavior, Malik)

The Safety Brain and the Connected Brain
Our brains are made up of billions of neural networks moderating our behavior; from regulating our heartbeat, to analyzing a math problem, to engaging in business and personal relationships. There are two main modes of operation through which we use our brains to engage the world on a moment to moment basis, we refer to these as the Safety Brain and the Connected Brain. Both of these modes have evolved to serve the useful purpose of navigating our experiences which not only keep us alive, but enable us to thrive.

The Safety Brain
The Safety Brain’s main job is to do anything and everything to protect us. This part of our brain is constantly scanning the horizon for potential danger and checking the latest input against our reference filing cabinet of past experiences. Anytime we believe we are threatened, it engages our protective automatic pilot reactions. The most extreme reactions are known as fight, flight, or freeze, but we actually engage mild forms of these reactions for each perceived unkind word, glance, or sound; or off-putting taste, smell, feeling or emotion.

The Connected Brain
The main job of our Connected Brain is to do anything and everything to thrive as we meet our needs for energy, love and growth. It processes information mindfully to facilitate creativity and empathy, sidestepping our Safety Brain and our need to judge people or situations. It is the part of our brain that sees oneness over separation. This part of our brain knows everything is going to be alright and that stress is a state of mind. It's the part of us that can be happy with things exactly as they are, no matter what is happening. It experiences being “in the now” and loves it as it is. It’s the part of ourselves that can be in the flow of what we are doing and who we are with. When this part of our brain is engaged, we have more access to creativity, compassion, intelligence and productivity.
(For more information see, Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who offers an easily accessible understanding of how a process like the Blueprint of WE can deeply impact our brain, and thus the experience of ourselves and others.)

The Limbic System and the Pre-frontal Cortex
The brain has also evolved to put as many actions on auto-pilot as possible to conserve time and energy. These auto-pilot processes take up about 80% of our brain activity and operate in our non-conscious. The other 20% of brain activity, our conscious experience, is used to evaluate new information, compare it to previous information in our filing cabinet, and alter, create, file or re-file auto-pilot responses to the many different situations in which we find ourselves. (See Managing with the Brain in Mind by David Rock and You Are Not Your Brain by Dr. Jeffery Schwartz.)

Which mode our brain engages is determined by the functions of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system operates within the 80% non-conscious activity of our brain, while the prefrontal cortex operates mostly in the 20%, conscious activity of our brain. The limbic system, or the mammalian brain, developed before the prefrontal cortex and is the instant evaluation center for all information gathered from inside and outside our bodies. Based on this information, the limbic system assigns predetermined auto-pilot responses and filters what small bits of information need to be sent to the prefrontal cortex.

"How does your brain decide if something should be approached or avoided? ...during the first few tenths of a second, light bouncing off this curved object (on the ground) is sent to the occipital cortex for processing into a meaningful image. Then the occipital cortex sends representations of this image in two directions: to the hippocampus, for evaluation as a potential threat or opportunity, and to the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain for more sophisticated - and time [and energy] consuming - analysis. ... your hippocampus immediately compares the image to a short list of jump-first-think-later dangers. It quickly finds curvy shapes on its danger list, causing it to send a high-priority alert to your amygdala: "Watch out!" The amygdala... then pulses both a general warning throughout your brain and a special fast-track signal to your fight-or-flight neural and hormonal systems (Rasia-Filho, Londero, and Archaval 2000). ...you jump back in alarm. Meanwhile, the powerful but relatively slow prefrontal cortex has been pulling information ... to figure out if the darn thing is a snake or a stick." (Buddha’s Brain by Dr. Rick Hanson with Richard Mendius M.D.; 34-35)

The limbic system acts as a switching station between our stress reactions, the sympathetic nervous system, and our peace actions and reactions, the parasympathetic nervous system. The prefrontal cortex, or the executive suite, monitors and modifies our reactions and alters and creates auto-pilot responses, comparing new information with old experiences. When stress is present, energy is diverted from the conscious mind to the other systems in our brain and body. The prefrontal cortex operates at full capacity when our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged.
(See Mindsight by Dr. Daniel Siegel; Buddha’s Brain by Dr. Rick Hanson; and The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge M.D.)

We use our conscious mind to create and alter our auto-pilot neural pathways to create the most efficient balance between activities that are designed to keep us safe, and activities that promote connection and growth. Whether our Safety Brain or our Connected Brain neural pathways are running determines the way we filter information and orchestrates how we act and react with one another. The more often our Safety Brain is engaged, the more we create auto-pilot actions that, in an effort to protect us, cut us off from energy and ideas that promote connection and productivity. No system can survive if it is cut off from healthy energy and input. When the Safety Brain is constantly running, cutting us off from positive connection, we tend to enter into a downward spiral that in the long run, actually threatens our safety.

We are actually safer when we primarily run our connected circuits, engaging the Safety Brain only when absolutely necessary. We can use our mind to consciously create as many positive, connected auto-pilot thoughts and activities as possible, with the help of collaboration processes like the Blueprint of WE.

Why the Blueprint of WE Collaboration Process Works

When you create a Blueprint of WE with others or with yourself (the Blueprint of ME), you gain awareness and gather the information and preferences of each person in the relationship. You have the opportunity to choose the reference files you'll access with regard to the other person or situation. So if I show up on my worst day exhibiting a behavior that your former boss subjected you to, you now have the option to run your old, fearful reactive files linked to the old boss. On the other hand, you can choose to run the files I gave you in our Blueprint of WE Collaboration Document, which says “this is what I do when I'm stressed, and this is what I need in the moment that I couldn't possibly ask for.” It gives us the opportunity to quiet our Safety Brain and engage our Connected Brain. Our Document not only lets us create new files to run, it gives us what we call our "What to Do in Case of Fire Manual" specifically tailored to each of us.

We have been brought up in a world that teaches, through it’s education system and cultural stories, to be Safety Brain dominant. It’s why people experience such high levels of stress on a daily basis. Blueprint of WE Collaboration Documents enable us to clean out the old filing systems and associated auto-pilot responses in our brain and create new, organized, proactive files and reactions. These enable us to more easily connect with our compassionate, resilient brains by turning down the stress-based neural circuitry running on auto-pilot.

We challenge you to more consistently run your Connected Brain circuits by providing your brain with the information needed to quiet the Safety Brain. Consistently Custom Design the best environment for yourself and others to engage the Connected Brain by creating and using Blueprint of WE Collaboration Documents.