P39: The Immersion Pivot

Welcome to Just One Pivot, your focused pause to spark your next best move. This week, we’re exploring the power of immersion to rewire how you think, feel, and show up to your next challenge or opportunity.

Let’s Talk Immersion

You know that feeling when you lose all sense of time, fully engaged, fully absorbed in a story, a film, or a moment? That kind of immersion where reality fades and you feel with the characters and for them?

Now let me ask you:

Are you the kind of person who feels deeply and then moves on to the next thing?

Or do you pause, just long enough, to ask:

Enjoying a story for pure entertainment is great. But what if you also used its effect on your brain to train a skill? A habit? Even a superpower?

Stories as Training Ground

That’s the kind of training ground I was in as a kid, though I didn’t know it at the time. First at the chessboard. Then, through the stories I read with my dad.

Most nights, after reading together, usually a classic, sometimes a parable, occasionally a poem, my father would pose a question. More of a writing prompt, really, for the journal he gave me.

Questions like:

Back then, I didn’t realize what he was doing.

Looking back, I see he was teaching me to immerse with purpose, and to enter the story and see it as more than entertainment and more like a safe laboratory to examine fear, rejection, consequences involving leadership and life choices.

He was helping me develop a skill that’s rarely taught and often overlooked: Strategic perspective-taking.

Strategic perspective-taking is the ability to step into someone else’s experience, think critically about what’s happening, and then choose to act differently: With more wisdom, more clarity, and more compassion.

That skill became one of the most important strengths I would carry into adulthood—first shaping how I led teams, then guiding my academic research, where I developed educational interventions to help mitigate empathy decline in healthcare. Today, it remains central to how I support leaders, teams, and mentees, as they navigate change and complexity in business and in life.

That’s where you come in.

Why It Works

Neuroscience research has shown that when we engage deeply with narrative, especially fiction, our brains light up as if we’re living the experience.

The prefrontal cortex. The mirror neuron system. The temporoparietal junction (TPJ), where moral reasoning, meaning, and empathy intersect. All of it is activated when we immerse in a story.

But here’s the interesting and exciting part: Practicing this skill has been linked to increased activity and grey matter volume in the TPJ of the brain. It’s like doing reps at the gym, but for your inner compass.

In other words, when we bring purpose and intention to what we read or watch, we’re no longer just consuming a story.

We’re rehearsing. We’re testing moral choices, navigating conflict, exploring motivations. We’re building the muscles of courage, compassion, foresight, and emotional clarity.

If all of this sounds intriguing and you want to take a deeper dive, check out my longer article.

Practice, Then Pivot

Still, we often fall into two camps: those who see fiction as fluff, and those who devour story after story without pause. And again, there’s nothing wrong with either. But as Paul Smith wrote in Lead with a Story:

Your Immersion Point

1. Pick a short story or leadership fable. Try The One Minute Manager, Bridge Builders, or a biblical parable like The Good Samaritan.

2. Step in, not just through. Don’t just finish the story. Engage it. Ask: What do these characters want? What are their motivations? What does the story want to teach me? How is it challenging me to respond?

3. Journal one insight. That’s how you tell your brain, “Let’s remember this and act on it.”

Enjoy the journey!

Until next week,

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