| Dr. Brian Walsh's book "Unleashing Your Brilliance: Tools and Techniques to Achieve Personal, Professional and Academic Success" examines the effects an individual's self-esteem can have on cognition and reasoning.
How Rejection Degrades Thinking and Performance
Clear thinking is crucial for carrying on a conversation, making decisions, and practically everything people do. Thinking can be clouded by a host of conditions including stress, dehydration, and poor nutrition. Now, studies reveal that rejection and criticism also have a significant influence on how well a person thinks. In a series of experiments at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, participants were exposed to a series of situations that resulted in manufactured feelings of rejection. The participants were given before and after intelligence and analytical skill tests. The researchers were amazed to learn that the intelligence scores plummeted by 25 percent and the analytical reasoning skills declined 30 percent on average.
Dr. Brian Walsh describes it this way, "We are born with the fear of abandonment. As humans, one of the most powerful drives we have is to connect, and be accepted. When rejected, some people's self-esteem tends to become unstable." In his book, Unleashing Your Brilliance: Tools and Techniques to Achieve Personal, Professional and Academic Success, Walsh explains that a person's self-esteem is forged in the first seven or eight years of life.
"Low self-esteem is fostered in an atmosphere of conditional love," he says. "It robs an individual of the psychological defenses needed to ward off the slings and arrows of life." Walsh believes that one of the most vital responsibilities of parents is to cultivate a robust self-esteem in their children. It is unconditional love that nurtures healthy self-esteem. So equipped, an individual can brush aside the occasional rejection that is bound to occur.
During research at Montreal's McGill University, social psychologists found that people under stress tend to pay more attention to frowning faces than smiling faces. Like the Law of Attraction suggests, whatever you focus on, you will attract more of. A person's depressed mood filters out positive situations, causing more focus on social threats like rejections and criticisms. These in turn will feed muddled thinking. In his book, Walsh demonstrates how this downward spiral can be reversed through intervention.
Unleashing Your Brilliance explains how the brain processes information, how learning is affected by emotions and core beliefs, and how innate brain wiring can be altered both unintentionally and intentionally. Walsh advises that negative emotions can inhibit cognition, memory, and generally fracture human wholeness. In Unleashing Your Brilliance, readers are introduced to several proven methods they can employ to change their destructive patterns and focus more on positive stimuli, creating significant changes for the better in all areas of life.
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