Years ago I met a Professor of Fish Biology at Bournemouth University; a world leading expert on predicting fish behaviour in reaction to changes to the oceans and their environment. She told me that the greatest skill she had to develop was not reading charts or looking down microscopes or understanding complex algorithms. No, none of these. The greatest skill she’d had to master was the ability to calm herself down into an almost Zen-like state before she entered an ocean or a tank of fish, otherwise the fish will ‘think’ she’s a predator and bugger off. And if they think she’s a predator and act accordingly, she cannot then take their behaviour as an accurate predictor of how they will actually react in natural conditions in the wild.
What the hell has a fish biologist got to do with me, I hear you ask? And I manage people, not fish… well, our working cultures are highly pressured. It’s all about deadlines and targets and timescales and comparisons and metrics and KPIs so we and our people are under constant pressure. And under pressure, our physiology tells us that we have to stay safe. So culturally it’s almost inevitable that our employees will default to safety, rather than habitually being expansive, creative and energetic. We then find this quite frustrating, and since we are our people’s physical environment, it’s no wonder that they often feel a predatory energy from us.
If we walk into a meeting, a 1:1 or even an ad hoc conversation by the water cooler, and we are carrying the slightest anxious energy, our people will pick up on it instantly and their ‘fight or flight’ will be triggered. It won’t matter if that anxious energy we are carrying is nothing to do with them; if it was caused by something else that happened to us earlier, or by something that we are worried or pre-occupied by. They’ll think it’s them. The ‘fish’ will bugger off – of course they will not physically do this, since walking out of a meeting with the Boss is the epitome of ‘career limiting’, not to say humanly discourteous. So the ‘fish’ stay and act like they are listening, even like they are agreeing, and our Egos don’t allow us to notice, although the evidence is clear.
Three brains, one instinct
Looking at the brain from the bottom to the top, we first have the Reptilian brain sitting right at the top of our spinal column attached to our central nervous system and housing the Cerebellum. This is the most ancient part of our brains, shared in common with many other animals, and with our evolutionary ancestors going right back to our emergence from the water millions of years ago, and it controls our basic physiology – it’s the part of my brain that controls my breathing and my bloodflow and that keeps me upright. No thinking, just pure unconscious programming passed down through genetics and DNA.
Next up is the Limbic system, containing the Amygdala, the Hippocampus, the Hypothalamus and the Thalamus. When the Amygdala, our radar system constantly sweeping our environment for any changes, detects a change, neurons fire within the Limbic system and ‘create’ the appropriate emotional response (fear, anger, disgust, surprise, joy, sadness). In the case of threat, it will trigger the fight, flight or freeze reaction.
And right at the top, is the Neocortex (neo = the ‘newest’ part of our brain) and by far the largest in volume and mass. The neocortex and the limbic system are sometimes referred to in combination as the Mammalian Brain. It’s the basic job of the Neocortex to prevent inappropriate responses – notice its job is not to choose appropriate responses. It is not there to do good or right; it is there to not do bad or wrong.
This fundamental programming to respond more to negatives than positives is at the heart of so many of our problems today, when we are more consciously concerned with thriving than ‘mere’ surviving. And this fundamental design dynamic is critical to our understanding of human behaviour within the Corporate World. We are hard wired to survive. We are not hard wired to thrive. We have learned how to do so, and we can consciously choose to do good, but under pressure, with, as one of my clients Gareth Morgan euphemistically refers to it, our Amygdala being tweaked, we’ll default to survival.
The circuit breaker
In normal working, our amygdala senses threat, and acts like a circuit breaker between the ancient parts of our brain that look after our basic survival, and the neocortex that runs our rational systems of learning, decision making and communication. In threat situations the amygdala shuts off the circuit to the neocortex, since all available blood must go to our arms and legs and the neocortex is a very blood hungry organ. Anyway it is simply not required in emergencies and would in fact be dangerous and way too time consuming to consult. In life or death situations it’s usually the thinking part of our brain that gets us killed!
Then the moment the threat has passed, probably after just a few seconds, the amygdala switches the circuit to the neocortex back on. In healthy people, the switch to the neocortex is in the open position probably 99.9% of the time, allowing the neocortex near free rein to do its job of managing the process of learning and conscious action – of taking in data, comparing it to everything we’ve ever learned in the past and either reinforcing learnings, or over-writing with new memories to adapt or even change our beliefs.
But in people with anxiety disorders, this circuit gets stuck in the off position, which explains why it is almost impossible to think calmly and rationally when we’re anxious. Telling someone to calm down, get a grip and pull themselves together is futile, and if this exhortation comes with an added invective of frustration (threat) will only serve to make matters worse.
And whereas the limbic system flushes through in about 90 seconds, anxiety can be a near permanent state, creating a constant loop of fight or flight responses. If I feel a ‘natural’ emotional reaction of anger, this will pass quickly. But now with my advanced neocortex, I can ‘choose’ to stay angry. My limbic system will not stay angry – it doesn’t need to, since for survival it now needs to calm down and rest in order to be ready for the next threat. But I can choose to stay feeling angry by passing the emotion to my neocortex. Here I can think myself into remaining angry for as long as I wish – and I can add to this, creating my own personal and glorious ‘Victim’s Cocktail’ of bitterness, resentment, envy, jealousy and drama.
Trigger 1: Calm the Fish
So the first ‘Trigger’ we need, as an instant and unconscious signpost for us to Coach, is simply ‘Calm the Fish’. This alone will help us to better regulate our own energetic state. But this trigger also helps us communicate openly and honestly. Sometimes it’s asking too much of ourselves to completely manage our frustration, impatience and irritation, but if we can go into a meeting owning our own state, and then communicate to the people assembled how we are and that it’s not because of them, we can stay authentic but with calmed fish around us to move forward positively.
Drawn from Trigger 1 of And the Leader Is… and Chapters 4 and 6 of Corporate Emotional Intelligence by Gareth Chick. The Three Brains model is explored interactively on the Method page.
