Our ability to accept and promote inaccurate information and mis-perception can often seem astonishing. This is, in part, fueled by how our brains process and remember information. Here are a few factors in our brain’s assessment of information that help propagate these misunderstandings, along with relevant coaching principles.

• Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain’s subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Therefore, when coaching – repetition, repetition, repetition is a key to change.

• Long-term memory is more apt than short-term memory to retain the bias that well-remembered false information is true.

Get the coaching information into long-term memory for change to stick. Repeat, repeat, repeat as above.

• Once an idea has been implanted in people’s minds, it can be difficult to dislodge.

Planting the coaching idea is the first step and its mere planting is useful.

• The brain is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something.

The coachee may not remember that you gave him or her the idea, but they may well remember the idea itself, and our egos aside, that of course is what’s most important.

• When accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true.

You must respond to a coachee’s assertions with something in order to affect change.

What we are referring to here is the difficulty that we, as coaches, find in changing people’s mental models. Often a coachee seems willful or even malicious in his or her obstinacy to retain incorrect beliefs and affect change. What is suggested here is that at least a portion of this behavior involves brain hard-wiring and that if we will work with that hard-wiring we can obtain better results.

Link: Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach