Project Management vs Sports Competition: how to use the right side of the brain

Posted by Carlo Marques on 23 Mar, 2018 10:10 am

When we are competing, we can’t be evaluating ourselves always. “The right hemisphere of our brain is the creative one that we use when we are competing and implementing things. The left hemisphere is the more rational (responsible for our critical judgment), that we generally use when we are learning and acquiring knowledge.

Tatiana Ferreira, Sports Psychologist

If we are competing, we must use the right hemisphere, linked with creativity and automatic thinking. If we keep judging ourselves and use the wrong hemisphere of the brain, that we’ll make our decision-making and thinking processes slower, as we are evaluating ourselves. We must focus on what we are doing at that precise second and not evaluating what we just did. To avoid this, what we need to do is to set up evaluation moments in advance, right before the competition (either pre-set time-out moments or moments pre-defined by ourselves). When those moments come, we do a speedy evaluation and then proceed to compete with no more judging.

This should be the same when we talk about projects management. We cannot be on an ongoing evaluation process, as that will cause people frustration (we tend to evaluate ourselves in a more negative way). Instead, we should set up evaluation moments beforehand and, on the other moments, we just implement, so we don’t slow down the process.