Photo by Peace Creative on Unsplash
I have a slew of fantastic nieces and nephews, and a few years ago I took them to dinner. My teen nieces had invented a thought experiment: if you could paint a picture of how your brain works, what would it look like?
One niece said, “I’m like a spider and my brain is a spiderweb: I rush over to deal with something caught in the web, I focus on that thing, then I’m off to the next thing.” Another said, “Mine is like an open play video game: I explore and enjoy it and then for no obvious reason I level up and it’s a whole new world to explore.” My nephew described his brain as a conveyor belt: ideas building up one after another going into a big machine.
My brain is like a game of Bananagrams. I’m scanning the tiles, looking for connections, then configuring them in multiple ways as new ideas enter the fray. At my best, my ADHD pattern-recognizing, big-picture neurons are in full effect. I love looking at a galaxy of information and seeing many ways of pulling it all together.
In the years since this dinner I’ve trotted this thought experiment out with people many times. I love hearing what comes up. It’s one of my favorite ways to get to know people. For some, this question feels very intimate. For others, it’s a welcome invitation. Every single answer is different.
What makes this question different from most getting-to-know-you questions is that there’s no right answer; nobody is judging you against some invisible standard. You’re asking someone to imagine with you. You’re inviting a playful connection, offering a small vulnerability that invites someone else into your world.
When I have my therapist hat on I often use the lens of internal family systems. One of the goals in that work is to ground yourself in your capital-S self. The qualities of capital-S self are often referred to as the “C qualities”, i.e., Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, Connectedness. When we are acting on those qualities, we are acting from the most grounded, human, authentic place we can. When I am working with Signal Strength clients, I’m helping them differentiate what they value from cog qualities (the ones we are rewarded for in our work systems) so they can settle deeper into themselves. Either way, describing our brainscapes is a quick way to embody values like curiosity, connection and creativity.
When we are in self, we can see so much more clearly. In that way, it’s also dangerous.
Ursula K. Le Guin said: “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”
The systems we work inside have a stake in keeping us focused outward — on performance, on legibility, on the question of how we’re being perceived. (In short, all the cog qualities embodied.) Inviting people and ourselves to play, on the other hand, allows us to explore from a place of self.
Knowing that I have a galaxy of bananagram tiles in my skull actually helped me to re-order the way I was approaching work. The work I do now takes direct advantage of this constant pattern-spotting. I am finding ways to help other people see the connections I see. Playing in this helped me reduce the shame I felt about the places where I saw myself falling short. This bananagram brain does not do everything well — hard structure, maintaining the details, staying focused on things it deems tedious. You know. Cog qualities.
This was a real reconstruction of my work identity, and it didn’t happen overnight. It starts with getting into self.
Here are some questions I use when I want to get back into self:
What can I be curious about in the stuck or difficult parts of my day? (Got a cranky boss? An unusually overwhelming negative feeling? Getting curious gets you out of a reactive place.)
What is a ridiculous and entirely unreasonable way I could solve this problem? (Pick up and move to Antarctica instead of answering email, create a complex Rube Goldberg machine to wake the kids up, etc. — creativity and humor are straight shots into self.)
And, of course, how would I describe my brainscape?
I’d love to know what your brainscape looks like. Hit reply and tell me.
If this resonated with someone you know, send it their way. And if you want to start identifying what’s signal and what’s noise for you specifically, the Values Sort available at this link takes about ten minutes. It’s free. The results are yours.