In both business and life, success often hinges on our ability to navigate various challenges with finesse and agility.

But what if I told you that your approach to problem-solving and decision-making is influenced by not just one, but three distinct centers of intelligence within you?

The Three Centers of Intelligence

Welcome to the fascinating world of the Head, the Heart, and the Stomach centers…

The Head Center of Intelligence

In the realm of the Head Center, you find the domain of thought and logic.

Here, concepts take shape through words, numbers, and maps, allowing you to discern patterns and establish order. This is how you divide one thing from another and how you compare one thing to another other establishing ranks and hierarchies.

The Heart Center of Intelligence

Moving to the Heart Center, you encounter a different form of intelligence—one rooted in love and connection.

Love wants to be closer to what it loves and immersed in what it loves. If you love someone, you want to be closer to them. If you love dancing, you want to dance. If you love playing chess, you want to play chess.

The heart does not care about good and bad or right and wrong. It does not care about rules and forms. It simply feels the pull of love and wants to move closer to whatever it loves.

There is a fluid, flowing quality to the heart and a softness and fuzziness to the heart’s intelligence, as opposed to the sharp, dividing clarity of the head’s intelligence.

The Stomach Center of Intelligence

And then, there’s the Stomach Center, where the intelligence is in the physical world through action and motion. You engage through your senses and instincts, whether you’re dancing, playing sports, driving a car or simply moving through your daily life.

In all those activities, you have to put your attention on where you and others are in space, how everyone is moving, and what will happen next. Just getting out of bed engages your stomach center.

When athletes speak of being “in the zone“, they mean times when they are not thinking or feeling, but just doing – times when the mind and heart are quiet and the stomach center is running the show.

If you reflect on the evolution of societies, you would see how each stage corresponds to the emergence of these centers of intelligence.

Understanding Each Center’s Role

Each of these centers boasts its own unique domain of expertise, making them indispensable assets in different aspects of our professional and personal lives.

Let’s delve deeper into how they operate and how they can shape our business and personal interactions.

The Head Center’s Dominance

The Head Center reigns supreme in the realm of logic and analysis. It’s where we excel in strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, and problem-solving.

Picture yourself driving down a crowded street—relying solely on logical analysis (counting other cars) won’t help you avoid an accident. Similarly, when filling out tax forms, simply entering numbers based on intuition won’t suffice—you have to crunch the numbers.

Challenges and Solutions

However, things can go awry when we apply the wrong kind of intelligence to a task.

Often, we lean on our favorite center of intelligence, the one we trust and use the most.

Whether it’s the Head, the Heart, or the Stomach, each has its place, but problems arise when we become overly reliant on one at the expense of the others.

Consider your own preferences: do you primarily trust your Head to think your way through business challenges, your Heart to feel your way through interactions, or your Stomach to drive action and execution?

Understanding our favored center—and our secondary and tertiary preferences—can shed light on our decision-making processes and interactions with others.

Cultural Implications

Now, let’s shift our focus to groups and cultures within our environment.

Just as individuals have dominant centers of intelligence, so too do groups exhibit collective tendencies.

Think back to high school—star athletes likely embodied Stomach-centered traits, while members of the Math Honor Society leaned toward the Head.

Heart-centered individuals may have found it challenging to carve out their niche.

In the broader cultural context, certain societies may prioritize specific centers of intelligence.

For instance, in the United States, where analytical thinking and strategic planning are highly valued, the Head center often takes precedence, followed by the Stomach. Heart-centered attributes may be undervalued, leading individuals who favor this center to feel out of place.

But here’s the key: regardless of our cultural or individual predispositions, you have the power to develop and integrate all three centers of intelligence.

Developing Each Center

The Head Center Development

To develop your Head-center, intentionally move your attention to your head and practice thinking about things, putting them in categories, seeing differences, seeing patterns, analyzing trends, putting them in order, and so on.

Focus on logic and reason, cause and effect, maps and charts and graphs.

The Heart Center Development

To develop your Heart-center, intentionally move your attention to the center of your chest and do things that focus on love, connection, beauty, harmony, and the like.

Maybe poetry, singing, dancing, painting, or sculpture. Maybe music, stories, or creating in general. Anything that focuses on feeling and expressing that feeling.

The Stomach Center Development

To develop your Stomach-center, intentionally move your attention to your belly and practice activities that involve moving through time and space, activities like playing catch, running, swimming, dancing, sports and martial arts in general.

Doing these activities competitively will push you even further in developing your skills.

Integration for Optimal Performance

Intentionally engaging in activities that target each center—whether it’s analytical thinking for the Head, creative expression for the Heart, or physical activities for the Stomach—can strengthen your overall capabilities and enhance your adaptability in diverse scenarios and environments.

Ideally, a healthy, mature adult has developed all three centers and has integrated them into one coordinated whole.