The Social Brain - An Introduction.
What if you were able to really understand how your partner’s brain works? Why they leave all the mess on the bench, or don’t want to talk about feelings, or need to be so organised (or not). What if you had a shortcut to understand each other and communicate more effectively?
What about your little ones? Why you have one that is a drama queen, or one you can’t understand. Maybe you have one that is creative (messy), or one that seems like a genius at something like dinosaurs or lego. If you’ve tried to parent them all the same way, you will have noticed that it doesn’t work.
The Social Brain is a system of colours created by Arini Verwer, that looks at the way that we take in and process information. This is our base operating system that we are born with, that determines how we view the world. People can act differently in various situations, so this is not personality but how our brain is wired. It can be quite easy to pick up clues from body language, facial expression, language and voice to roughly determine a colour, and make general communication easier.
However, the real magic of the Social Brain is when you determine your own colour, and those of your family and friends. You’ll know their highest values, their strengths and weaknesses, the words to use that they will hear - the shortcuts for communication. You’ll also know how they like to be communicated with, to get everyone’s needs met.
The colours are the names given to a pattern of processing information. It is determined by how we take in information and then how we process it - in a combination of mental, emotional or action - correlating to the brain cortex, limbic system or brainstem.
No colour is better or worse - they all have a role. The strength in one can also be a weakness, just as any weakness can also be a strength.
When starting out with the Social Brain, here are some of my tips:
Start by determining your own colour first, then expand to family and friends
No one else should choose your colour for you. Only you know how you are processing the world.
We are often friends with people our colour because we have similar values and communication, however we rarely partner with the same colour. They have something that we don’t have, or need to learn, that is attractive.
Learn the colours with friends. This is fun, but also helpful to pick up the nuance, and start conversations about how you each see situations.
There is overlap in the colours, because it is a combination of 3 aspects, but there will also be major differences. You can not be more than one colour - you will have a default. You can act in any of them for different situations.