The BrainStyles System is the result of extensive research and testing in business and personal environments on how specific patterns of brain hardwiring determine an individual’s speed and approach to decision-making, risk-taking, conflict resolution, and relationships. Working and collaborating with an awareness of this “wiring” can unlock major contributions to productivity and successful relationships with less stress.
The BrainStyles System® gives leaders, managers, HR professionals, executive coaches, and individuals invested in improving themselves, the tools they need to work better with others, make organizational assessments, and build dynamic teams based on their natural, hardwired abilities.
Your natural abilities are observed most clearly when you must think about a new decision, and the timing of those decisions is unique to you. In order for you to think about something, the left and right sides of your brain must have a conversation, each side adding its particular expertise. This happens across miles of neural pathways. You draw most naturally from the areas of the brain you can access most easily and effortlessly. Your brainstyle is shorthand for you at your best, most natural, and most able.
Everything in life rests in our ability to make decisions. Some decisions are instinctive. Others are based on learned behavior and our experiences. You may have taken personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. These tests often offer a way others view you and offer ways to adapt to others by learning new skills or techniques, but they don't teach you how to leverage your natural gifts or the different gifts of others. BrainStyles shows you how to be yourself more easily and naturally. In any partnership, timing is the problem – and timing is also the solution. BrainStyles teaches you to allow time for the strengths of those around you to shine.
BrainStyles is a framework for understanding how you interact with others. When you invest in understanding your own brainstyle, you can realize limitless personal mastery. You'll use timing, rather than control or avoidance to understand and be understood. You'll support others while doing things their own way. You'll define situations, jobs, or events rather than being defined by them. You'll react less, learn from everyone, and cease to be a victim. And you'll see life as an opportunity to use your strengths everywhere, effortlessly, and naturally.
The ideas and premises that ground BrainStyles in real life situations were developed in 1982 by the CEO of a struggling company. The breakthroughs of hemispheric conversation and timing, which were later validated by Marlane Miller's original research in genetics and neuroscience, came to the CEO in sleepless all-night sessions. These premises were initially tested and validated by an expert research team from the University of North Texas with other leadership teams. By 1993, The BrainStyles Assessment was co-developed and validated at over 90 percent face validity by Miller and a researcher at the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University.
In 1994, Scientific American published some of the first color PET scan images of the brain at work, adding further support to the way our brainstyles use different parts of the brain when trying to reach new or unfamiliar decisions. BrainStyles has since been repeatedly tested and validated in business and personal environments by independent consulting firms, psychologists, and researchers across the world, including ITESM, the largest private educational institution in Latin America.