Ed Batista

The Value of Journal Writing

Most of the work I do as an executive coach (particularly at Stanford) involves asking clients and students to keep a journal.  In some cases this is a structured (and graded!) class assignment, and several times a year my academic duties include reading and commenting on students' journals while they're taking our experiential "Interpersonal Dynamics" class.  But even if someone's journal is just a series of informal, private notes, the purpose is to insure that the learning doesn't stop at the end of the coaching session or the class exercise.

My empirical experience as a journal-reader, as a coach working with journal-writers, and as an occasional journal-keeper myself has convinced me of the value of this practice, and this fits with my conceptual understanding of experiential learning cycles.  But I'm still left wondering why it actually works: What are the underlying processes that make journal writing a meaningful activity?

The work of neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux suggests some answers.  Ledoux's work has focused on memory, emotions and cognition, and he talked about memory with the Edge "World Question Center":

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.

So journaling 1) compels us to access our memories of an experience, 2) creates another, more recent memory of that experience, and 3) creates a physical record of those memories to which we can return in the future.

But Ledoux's work on emotion and cognition suggests an even more powerful reason for the value of journaling.  A key theme for Ledoux is the distinction between emotional memories, which he defined in an Edge interview with John Brockman as "implicit, or procedural memories that are in the brain's systems, but not reflected in consciousness" and cognitive, or explicit, memories, which he defined as "the kind of memory we usually have in mind when we use the word memory in everyday speech."

Some coaching sessions and experiential learning activities evoke intense emotions in the participants, but as Ledoux told Brockman...

[T]he brain can produce emotional responses in us that have very little to do with what we think we're dealing with or talking about or thinking about at the time. In other words, emotional reactions can be elicited independent of our conscious thought processes. For example, we've found pathways that take information into the amygdala without first going through the neocortex, which is where you need to process it in order to figure out exactly what it is and be conscious of it. So, emotions can be and, in fact, probably are mostly processed at an unconscious level. We become conscious and aware of all this after the fact.

So journaling after emotional experiences allows us to process them when we can understand them cognitively and (in some cases) consciously for the first time.

But, of course, many otherwise valuable coaching sessions and experiential learning activities don't evoke strong emotions; is it helpful to journal in these cases as well?  Again, Ledoux's work suggests that it is.  From an interview with Ledoux conducted by the Dana Foundation:

There is both an upside and a downside to the fact that emotional states make memories stronger. The upside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones. The downside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones.

So journaling after non-emotional experiences bolsters our memories of these experiences and helps to insure that they're not lost among our more powerful and long-lasting emotional memories.

One final thought--Ledoux also discussed with Brockman the potent and even destructive power of emotional memories:

Many people have problems with their emotional memories; psychologists' offices are filled with people who are basically trying to take care of and alter emotional memories, get rid of them, hold them in check.

I'd never suggest that journal-writing is a substitute for psychological care, but I do wonder if the experience of cognitively processing emotional memories in a journal entry might have some transformative power, allowing us not only to better understand those memories but also to better manage and make use of them.

(Perhaps surprisingly, given my general fondness for technology, I'm a big fan of journaling with pen and paper.  The downsides are manifest--not searchable, not archivable, and the stuff does tend to pile up.  But the upside is that it's a lot less tempting to edit and re-write, and I just get my thoughts out and move on.  A sentence today is worth a page tomorrow.   I'm not picky about pens--I prefer cheap blue Bics--but I truly love Moleskine notebooks.)

Thanks to Mark Oehlert for refererring me to Ledoux in the first place. Photos by Del Far and culture.culte.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Neuroscience, Coaching, Leadership and Learning

Inspired by the fascinating research being conducted by Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger and other neuroscientists, some great neuroscience blogging by Stephanie West Allen, Jeffrey Schwartz and Roger Dooley, the work of Alvaro Fernandez and Co. at SharpBrains, and the prescient questions that Tom Wolfe has been asking for the past decade, I've become obsessed by the implications of neuroscience for the fields of executive coaching, leadership development and experiential learning.

I'm well aware of the limitations of current brain-imaging technology and of the excesses of "neuro-hype" (well-documented in Haaretz by Ofri Ilani and Yotam Feldman--thanks to Roger Dooley for the reference), and I've expressed concerns myself about the rejection of sound humanistic principles by neuroscience boosters--and yet I remain convinced that neuroscience holds tremendous promise for coaches, organizational development consultants and experiential educators.

I find Wolfe's work extremely compelling.  In the articles and talks I link to above (and presumably in the upcoming book on neuroscience to which he occasionally alludes), Wolfe asserts that Homo sapiens have in some ways freed ourselves from genetic determinism by means of language and, more precisely, speech.*  For at least the last 11,000 years (dating from the earliest evidence of agriculture), Wolfe claims, speech has allowed us to adapt to and overcome our environment far faster than our genes ever could.  From Wolfe's recent interview with Steve Heilig for the S.F. Chronicle:

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

And perhaps the most important change is that we're no longer merely the expression of our genetic heritage; our speech-sodden brains are far more plastic and malleable than our hard-wired genes would ever allow us to be.  Advances in genetics in recent decades ultimately suggested that humans lacked free will--our fate was written in our genes.  But Wolfe sees things differently--more from his Chronicle interview:

I'm willing to say OK, we may have no free will, but speech creates so many variables that it doesn't really matter. No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech. Laws you obey, scientific findings you assume to be correct, creeds you believe in, existing plans you go by, history as you understand it - these artifacts, once accepted, will affect your thoughts and behavior and use you more than you use them.  Culture is just too big a variable to explain away with genetics...

So what's the connection with my fields of executive coaching, leadership development and experiential education?  If genetic determinism would have us believe that "Leaders are born, not made," then Wolfe's theories on the power of speech and the meaning of culture suggest just the opposite.  We have "natural," genetically-defined tendencies that support or undermine our ability to lead and to be effective interpersonally, but those natural abilities don't define our actions in those spheres.  We can learn, we can adapt and we can improve.  Some leaders may be born with a genetic head start, but all truly effective leaders are made, not born.

And just as Lieberman, et al's research on the impact of talking about feelings provides a scientific explanation for a practice that I've used in my own work countless times, Wolfe's theories and the neuroscience on which they're based suggest that many of the practices we employ in coaching, leadership development and experiential education are effective because they're consistent with--and take advantage of--the way our brains function.  (And at the same time, neuroscience also has the potential to tell us which practices and techniques are ineffective and need to be updated or scrapped.)

As noted above, I'm mindful of the limits of neuroscience, and I'd hate to see the genetic determinism of recent years replaced by a "neuro-determinism" that simply substituted brain scans for gene maps.  But we're clearly at a point where humanistic professionals--executive coaches, OD consultants, experiential educators--need to incorporate neuroscience into their practices.

* Wolfe actually suggests that we rename ourselves Homo loquax--"Talkative man"--a proposal that may have been inspired by Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which Miller called us Homo loquax nonnumquam sapiens--"Talkative, and sometimes wise, man."

Talking About Feelings

Much of my work involves encouraging people to talk about their feelings--a process formally known as affect labeling--which can happen in a free-flowing coaching conversation or in a structured environment like a T-group.  Experience tells me that this is a useful practice...but why?  What happens when we talk about our feelings?

Stephanie West Allen recently referred me to a post of hers from June 2007 that noted a "flurry of articles...about the neuroscience research showing that labeling your feelings can quiet your brain and increase impulse control."  Stephanie also linked to the original Psychological Science research article by Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger et al, Putting Feelings into Words (PDF), that prompted that flurry in the popular press, and it's fascinating reading:

Putting feelings into words has long been thought to be one of the best ways to manage negative emotional experiences. Talk therapies have been formally practiced for more than a century and, although varying in structure and content, are commonly based on the assumption that talking about one's feelings and problems is an effective method for minimizing the impact of negative emotional events on current experience...

Recent neuroimaging research has begun to offer insight into a possible neurocognitive mechanism by which putting feelings into words may alleviate negative emotional responses. A number of studies of affect labeling have demonstrated that linguistic processing of the emotional aspects of an emotional image produces less amygdala activity than perceptual processing of the emotional aspects of the same image (Hariri, Bookheimer, & Mazziotta, 2000; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005). Additionally, these studies have demonstrated greater activity during linguistic processing than during nonlinguistic processing of emotion in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), a region associated with the symbolic processing of emotional information (Cunningham, Johnson, Gatenby, Gore, & Banaji, 2003; Nomura et al., 2003) and with top-down inhibitory processes (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004). Finally, the magnitude of RVLPFC activity during affect labeling has been inversely correlated with the magnitude of amygdala activity during affect labeling in these studies. Together, these results suggest that putting feelings into words may activate RVLPFC, which in turn may dampen the response of the amygdala, thus helping to alleviate emotional distress...

The results of this study provide the first clear demonstration that affect labeling disrupts the affective responses in the limbic system that would otherwise occur in the presence of negative emotional images...

These data thus suggest that one route by which putting feelings into words may regulate negative affect is by increasing activity in RVLPFC, which in turn dampens activity in the amygdala by way of intermediate connections through [the medial prefrontal cortex]...

In summary, this study provides the first unambiguous evidence that affect labeling, compared with other ways of encoding, produces diminished responses to negative emotional images in the amygdala and other limbic regions...

These findings begin to shed light on how putting negative feelings into words can help regulate negative experience, a process that may ultimately contribute to better mental and physical health.

Lieberman is apparently at work on a new research article dealing with similar issues, a draft of which is also available online: Symbolic Processing of Affect (PDF).  From the introduction:

[T]here is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the process of sharing one's worry, of putting bad feelings into words, can diminish one's emotional distress at least under certain circumstances. This chapter will examine the neurocognitive mechanisms of disruption effects, the process by which putting feelings into words can disrupt the feelings being verbalized.

I'm reluctant to quote further from this work-in-progress--the cover page warns "DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION"--but a cursory reading suggests that Lieberman's latest neuroscientific research provides further evidence that talking about our feelings is an extremely helpful process.

(Note the new "neuroscience" category that I've added with this post.  My recent interchange with Stephanie West Allen--who writes regularly on the topic of neuroscience and conflict resolution--has highlighted for me the importance of integrating a better understanding of current neuroscience research with the rest of my work.) 

Photo by malias.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.