This brief paper is based on work done by David Rock, Coach, Author and Head of the Neuroleadership Institute https://neuroleadership.com/
Neuroscience tells us that the human brain is a meaning-seeking, pattern-making, prediction organ. It will seek meaning in everything (if someone does not return that call, we make stuff up about what that means and then interestingly, act as if the stuff we made up is true!!). It is built on one simple principle, maximise reward, minimise threat, with a huge bias towards minimise threat, in order to keep us ‘safe’.
From the moment we are born and before, we are forming scripts / patterns of how the world and everything in it is and strategies of how to deal with it all. We build lenses from our beliefs through which we ‘perceive’ reality. Learning from our parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, people in school etc., scripts / patterns that get laid down in our subconscious mind and we then act on them throughout life, subconsciously, (it is thought we spend 70% and maybe above, in a trance state, ie.below the level of conscious awareness, acting on these laid down scripts.)
Now here’s the thing, we each set expectations based on our ‘learned model’ of for instance, whether or not we can achieve / attain a specific goal. If the goal looks to us to be just a little beyond the expectation we hold of our ability to achieve it ,,that is superb and will motivate us to strive, it puts us in the ‘flow’ state… if however our expectation (based on our ‘learned model’) is that we will never achieve it, then that puts us into stress (because we are not certain now of our ability to achieve), we enter a threat state, commonly known as an amygdala flood, we fire off adrenaline, cortisol and place the brain with amygdala in control in a fight flight or freeze mode….In this mode the pre-frontal cortex, (the mature thinking creative adult part of our brain is shut down) and we act from the amygdala much as we did as a six year old, in fact recalling the six year old’s patterns or scripts!!
Just observe a sales progress meeting where a very high level exec is screaming at his people, that they must do better, pure playground bullying. Those being bullied and the observers again act as they did when they were children (as is he actually). Just notice in meetings you attend when two people disagree, watch what everyone does. They automatically run the patterns they learned back then, unless, they have woken up to what’s really going on and are consciously choosing in the moment, how to proceed, in thinking, in behaviour. Being mindful in fact
This is not a way to run a business, we need to run it as a human system, we are social animals, we need each other, we must learn how our brains work and begin to appreciate each other in an adult way with respect.
Let us not run it by getting everybody stressed out and running about in their six year old’s romper suit!