CIMBA MBA

This month CIMBA MBAs and staff were again privileged to have Dr. David Rock present a seminar on the Neuroscience of Leadership.  Throughout the morning, Dr. Rock gave a brief refresher of elements presented during his first visit in September.  In hearing this information again, I realized how much of it has been reiterated and hardwired over my past 6 months at CIMBA.  The idea of helping someone have their own "insight" when faced with a problem, as apposed to pushing one's own way of thinking onto them, has really been enforced through solutions-oriented coach questions.  Furthermore, I have realized how much coaching helps quiet the emotional limbic system, enabling those being coached to think through problems more calmly and rationally using the pre-frontal cortex of their brains.

The second aspect of Dr. Rock's presentation that resonated most with me was the Inverted U curve.  Essentially, this is a graph of arousal or stress versus performance.  An increase in stress level is beneficial and results in increased performance, but only to a point.  Past a certain point of optimal performance, increases in stress become too much and start to negatively affect performance.  This year CIMBA introduced meditation into its already unique curriculum, furthering its gap above standard MBA programs.  According to Dr. Rock, practicing meditation to control stress levels can help students control where they are on the Inverted U curve, thus optimizing their performance.  In general, listening to Dr. Rock's presentation reaffirmed many things CIMBA embraces and gave them even more weight, explaining the scientific rationale behind them.

~Marjorie Davis, CIMBA Full Time Student, from Seattle, Washington