As I think about this more, when we think about the right brain and left brain are we really talking about gender, feminine vs masculine – not so much creative vs logical, intuitive vs conceptual or holistic vs individualistic. And these are just properties separated into masculine and feminine characteristics. I’m not talking about biological sex, a male can be feminine and a female can be masculine, each characteristic, personality, cognitive function along a spectrum. Everyone would be somewhere along the spectrum of dichotomies, to degrees and certain extents, not binary 1s and 0s. And it could be even true that people’s dichotomies can change or flip in different scenarios – they might use one cognitive function when it comes to work scenarios and another cognitive function when it comes to family situations.
It’s an interesting exploration, the distinction between feminine and masculine as a metaphor between the right and left brain. I recently heard a talk about the qualities of leadership or I suppose leadership from either a point of “challenge” or from the approach of “caring”. Discussing the book “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott. The discussion describes “challenge” as a masculine quality and “caring” as a feminine quality, or maybe more illustrative a “father energy” versus a “mother energy”. The point was that leadership with only “challenge” makes the team feel like the leader doesn’t care about them. While leadership with only “caring” doesn’t challenge growth and progress.
But if I break this down a bit more, unpack and distill it away from a discussion about leadership. We can re-contextualize this as a discussion about gender. Because the main distinction isn’t even about “care” or “challenge”. We can see how maybe one side is more nurturing and supportive and the other side is more competitive and results-oriented. And we can see how we need both to balance each other out.
We can recall teachers, coaches, parents, bosses or even peers that had one more dominant side than the other. If they were too accepting and nurturing then they made it seem like everything we did was fantastic, didn’t really care about how we faired or couldn’t trust their barometer for what was actually “good” – or we didn’t feel an urgency of growth or challenge. Or if they were too critical and results-oriented, then nothing was good enough, an overbearing sense of judgment and criticism and we didn’t feel like they cared about us.
The closer we can get to bringing both into our consciousness, being able to access both realms in our own psychology or at least be more open to accepting, embracing and acknowledging our opposite view-set or seeking out, bringing in, interacting with, relating to more counter-balances in our lives, we’ll have a great expansion of how we understand ourselves and each other. We need both within ourselves, we need both within each other to be more wholly human.