Is psychology key to performance?
PROFESSIONAL MINDS ARE DECADES BEHIND ATHLETES
The world of sports has been revolutionized by psychologists. How long before psychologists make an impact in the professions?
I believe that every professional role is a performance. We perform best when we are psychologically prepared and emotionally controlled.
THE STIGMA
In sports and family life, psychologists are challenged by the stigma surrounding their work. Even top performing athletes find it difficult to embrace psychological support. They worry it is a sign of weakness. This is preposterous. Let’s end this egotistical stigma and embrace the complexity of our brains. I very much doubt that the Team GB cycling team that dominated the gold medals at London 2012 are worried about the stigma of psychology.
Drop the stigma and you could find your winning edge.
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN … IN ZONES
As I learned from Dr. Steve Peters’ (Team GB Psychologist) accessible book, The Chimp Paradox, it is useful to think of your brain as split into zones. The different zones are responsible for different types of thinking and decision making. Peters discusses several scientifically observable zones of the brain and gives them easily relatable characters: the inner chimp, the inner human, the computer, the autopilot and others.
For the purposes of these articles, let’s take two of Peters’ zones: the inner chimp and the inner human. This time, it’s the inner chimp.
THE INNER CHIMP
Your inner chimp is responsible for the big decisions: fight, flight or freeze. Evolutionarily, it has the most important job: survival. The chimp doesn’t provide you with a sense of right or wrong. All the chimp cares about is staying alive. It is easy to understand why your inner chimp is irrational and unreasonable: these words mean nothing to the chimp.
All decisions made by your inner chimp are done without consulting any other zone in your brain – it runs on pure, unadulterated emotion. For your chimp, it is better/safer to err on the side of caution. You do no harm to your chances of survival by seeing dangers that aren’t there or over-estimating the danger in any situation. Your chimp is an over-sensitive reactionary!
Each of us has a different inner chimp – some chimps are angry or cautious while others are more compassionate or loving. Our chimps are the ones responsible when we snap at a colleague or jump to a defensive position when someone offers a critique of our ideas. They are also responsible when we quickly conform without critical evaluation.
Have you ever said something you later regretted in the heat of the moment? Chances are it was your inner chimp at work! After something like this, we often beat ourselves up. Maybe things aren’t so black and white. Once the heat has died down, we start to see the grey areas and realize our sense of urgency was possibly misplaced. Letting your chimp out in public can be disastrous, particularly at work.
The environment our species evolved in has changed dramatically. We don’t really need to be so sensitive to danger any more. The trouble is that our chimps interpret all kinds of things as subtle threats and influence our behavior. Even worse - we cannot stop it! Our chimps are a lot stronger than any other zone in our brains. It is strongest and least clever!
In the “corporate jungle”, it is not snakes, alpha males, falling fruit or lions that our inner chimp is scared of, it’s deadlines, disharmony, differences of opinion and competition. Professionals often find it hard to separate themselves from their work and ideas. When professionals have their work and ideas criticized, the inner chimp interprets the criticism as an attack. All of a sudden, the irrational, emotionally led part of the professional’s brain is in control and it wants to survive. Look out, the chimp is out!
The good news is that you can learn to recognize when your chimp is dominating control of your feelings and actions. Once you recognize it, you can begin to control it. The more we practice, the better we get at controlling our chimps and reacting rationally to high-pressure situations. I have also found that once you get to know your own chimp, you begin to recognize and get to know other people’s inner chimps.
If we take the time to understand our inner human, we can master our inner chimp and our emotions at work.
THE SCIENCE
I’ll summarize the science quickly to keep this blog about the world of work. Check out the book if you want to understand more, it’s great.
It is sufficient to say that the zones of your brain need oxygen to function. It also helps to know that there is only one source of oxygenated blood into the brain and your zones form an orderly queue at the source. Your inner chimp is prioritized for blood over your inner human. This makes intuitive sense when you consider what the inner chimp’s job is: survival and reproduction. For the species to be a success, your survival instincts are more important than reason, rationality and … um … poetry.
If you are staring death in the face and must fight, fly or freeze to get through it, you haven’t got time to reason. As such, the inner chimp sees things in black & white and is totally ignorant of the complexities of the situation – in the heat of the moment, grey areas are irrelevant. Quite right too… in the jungle.
When we are led by emotions, the oxygen being pumped into our brains is used up by the inner chimp. With our rational capacities starved of fuel, we can make poor decisions or simply fight the wrong battles.
We need to train ourselves to recognize when the inner chimp is hogging the blood supply in order to apply dispassionate rationality to any situation.
Amazingly, we can actually change the blood flow in our own brains by rejecting emotions and bringing our inner humans to the fore. N.B. this is not to say that emotions are bad and should be suppressed, more to the point is that we should learn when and how to exercise our emotions in the right environment. The chimp does need regular exercise!
You cannot simply turn your chimp's instincts off. They can influence your actions subtly (e.g. defensiveness or closed mindedness) or overtly (e.g. aggression or panic). There are elements of your inner chimp's fear in almost everything you do. The best thing we can do is to stop our inner chimps starving our inner humans of oxygen. Ultimately, this is what helped Team GB win gold and what will help professionals manage their minds for success.
THE INNER HUMAN
Your inner human is responsible for important decisions and the interpretation of emotion. It is the source of reason. There is no such thing as black or white. Your inner human is capable of complex decision making and helps you to explore the grey areas.
Ref: Professor Steve Peters book, The Chimp Paradox