Managing "complex" environments (a new take on the old Cynefin model)

I recently heard a talk on managing complexity which made good use of the Cynefin model (pronounced Kin-eh-vin) originally developed by Dave Snowden. I'm told that Dave was always at great pains to say it isn't a simple 2x2 model. But now, by incorporating something about the brain, I'm going to modify it to make it exactly that. Sorry Dave!

The horizontal dimension is about the predictability of the environment - predictable at one end and unpredictable at the other. Without defining the other dimension, Dave produced a model which had four domains (plus the central area as a fifth domain).

My insight when listening to the talk was to realise that the other dimension was all about the type of thinking needed - whether it needs to be "Fast" or "Slow" (per Daniel Kahneman). At one end we have pure Fast (System 1) thinking. At the other we have not just Slow (System 2) thinking, but both Fast AND Slow - ie a mindful approach. My new version of this model is therefore shown below:

Why I found this insight helpful was that it made me understand how difficult it is in Complex and Complicated environments if we are NOT mindful, ie we lose our System 2. If we get threatened by the unpredictability of Complex environments, System 2 is closed down, and they seem (and soon become) Chaotic. And if tiredness or overload causes us to switch off System 2 in Complicated environments, we can treat them as if they were Routine (or Simple / Obvious) - with inevitably bad consequences.

So the mechanisms for approaching each environment appropriately are our usual ones involving awareness and mind management:
(a) be aware of your internal state (Is this a time to keep your System 2 on - ie be mindful?)
(b) recognise the predictability of the situation (Is it full of "problems" or are they "dilemmas"?)

Very pleased to have been reminded of a neat model - please google it to find out more...

The neurobiology of Systems 1 & 2

I was coaching a group on a programme last week where one of the speakers was Paul Dolan - another of the behavoural scientists who uses the System 1 / System 2 language made famous by Daniel Kahnemann in his recent bestseller "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow". Paul was great, and Daniel's book is a must read. What I want to do in this post is connect that language with the work of the neuroscientists - the simplified model of the brain used by eg Dr Daniel Siegel ("Mindsight"), David Rock ("Your Brain at Work"), and Dr Stephen Peters ("The Chimp Paradox") amongst many others.

The reason I want to do this is that what the neuroscience tells us is that having a mental picture (literally a picture) of the brain is what helps you use your knowledge to change things. But the system 1 & 2 insights are all explained in words! So it struck me it would be really helpful to try to map the words onto the picture. The good news is it turns out to be pretty easy - my own version of the brain model is shown below, and super-imposed on the picture are Kahnemann's thinking systems. Once you see the linkage you can also see how managing the limbic and PFC helps you manage systems 1 & 2.



System 1 is your autopilot - your limbic recognises the situation and automatically selects the appropriate programmes or data to address that situation. The various biases of System 1 (Paul's mnemonic was MINDSPACE) can all be explained by the limbic's emotional perception. Eg M stands for Messenger - we tend to believe someone who is "like us". It seems clear to me that the reason we distrust someone "unlike us" is that the limbic perceives difference as a threat, and the appropriate response to threat is to avoid / reject. You can similarly work through the rest of the mnemonic for yourself. So managing system 1 is really about managing the limbic.

 

System 2 is your intentional thinking - it needs to use the PFC to deliberately choose the programmes and data to use, or even to create new programmes and data. We know from neuroscience that the PFC is easily over-worked and also shut down by negative emotions - which explains why system 1 is often used just when we might need system 2 most, eg in critical decision-making situations. So once again, the key to using system 2 when you need it would appear to be managing the limbic. 

 

There are two other things this linkage tells us. One is that we can use system 2 to re-train system 1. The limbic learned by experience and can be re-trained by using the PFC to deliberately create alternative experiences - real or imagined in your head. That is essentially what we are doing in coaching, self-reveiew journaling or other developmental practices. We can also develop system 2's ability to monitor the activity of system 1. Practicing mindfulness mindfulness improves the PFC's function in both emotional regulation and monitoring. You may still be on autopilot using system 1 - but you can at least your system 2 can be aware that you are! 

 

Daniel Kahnemann can sometimes be a bit negative about the chances of changing our biases or improving our inherently bad decision-making. But with this link to the brain model, I think we can all be a lot more positive. 



Tai Chi and the limbic brain

I discovered the other day that one of my fellow Tai Chi teachers, who is also an executive coach, did his Ashridge Masters thesis on the linkages between Tai Chi and coaching. It made me realise that, although Tai Chi is a very big part of my life and certainly supports my coaching, I have until now never blogged about it. So let me pick out one linkage I make right now - Tai Chi and management of the limbic response. And in future I may share some of his insights.

In many other posts (and on my website) I have explained the neurobiology of the limbic response. Stong negative emotions (eg fear) limit our ability to respond. We simply react - typically with "fight", "flight" or "freeze". We get rigid (inflexible) and lose the ability to empathise or to act "intentionally". When we are stuck like this, one way to free ourselves up is to change our perception of the situation and thus reduce our limbic response - that is the goal of a lot of coaching.

But it also works the other way around. If we can relax the body's reaction we can directly reduce the linbic response, which in turn can change our perception. Which is where Tai Chi helps. Tai Chi is all about relaxation. When we practice our solo form we seek to eliminate tension and maintain relaxation throughout the exercise. And when we practice Tai Chi as a martial art (ie the two person exercise of "Pushing Hands" or "Sensing Hands") we are directly training our body not to react with fight, flight or freeze, even under the actual physical threat of another's contact (their push). When we stay relaxed, we continue to sense where the other person is coming from (equivalent to empathising) and we use our connection  with them to re-direct them - not fight, not flight and not freeze.

In the longer term, confidence in the power of staying relaxed actually changes your habitual fear response - the world and other people become less threatening. The corresponding reduction in fear (ie stress) in your life is clearly one of the health benefits of Tai Chi. But in the context of business leadership, the true benefit of Tai Chi (like other mindfulness practices) is in improving your ability to manage your limbic response - a huge advantage in almost any situation.

Generating acronyms to apply neuroscience

Yesterday I was at a local interest group meeting of the NeuroLeadership Institute, listening to a presentation by NLI founder David Rock.

He was talking about learning and memory, and the simple yet powerful image of memory as a big neural net of connections, so that the bigger we make the net, eg by activating neurons in many different parts of the brain at the same time, the easier it is to access it. As part of his talk he explained his acronym for effectiveness in establishing the net - particularly when imparting learning re knowledge, ideas, concepts etc. The acronym is AGES, which stands for Attention, Generation, Emotion, and Separation.

I found the most interesting one to reflect on was Generation, which is about doing something immediately to create personal meaning out of what you have just heard or read. All good teachers know this from experience, but the research shows it is even more important than we think. For example, if immediately after explaining an idea, you ask people to tell you (or their neighbour) when and how they could apply it to a real-life situation, it makes it much more likely that the idea will stick. If they don't, it probably won't. It's worth taking a minute now to think about when you do and don't do this, and how you might do it more effectively, ie in a way which creates the biggest net.

Using acronyms can itself be a mini-application of AGES - but only if they are your own. Making up an acronym is pure Generation. It requires quite a lot of effort (high Attention), there is a sense of triumph on finding a good one - especially if this is preceded by a period of frustration when you can't see it (negative switching to positive Emotion). And I often return to think about it / play with it several times over a period of a week (Separation). It's rare, therefore, that I forget my own acronyms!

But what do you do when someone gives you an acronym? What I always do is try to modify it to make it my own. Instead of AGES, I remember SAGE, which for me links to knowledge and wisdom. And instead of Rock's SCARF for his social threat model, I remember SCARE, which obviously links to threat - simply replacing his F for Fairness with E for Equity. And for his four conditions for allowing insight I remember QUIET PINT, standing for Quiet, slightly Positive, Internally focused, and Not Trying - again the link is obvious!

So I offer you SAGE, SCARE and QUIET PINT... but with some sadness recommend you don't use them. Try to make up your own!

Why practice mindfulness?

Mindfulness is big! And that in itself can be a barrier. We worry that if too many diverse benefits are claimed to flow from mindfulness then perhaps it is too good to be true, like the magic elixirs peddled by snake oil salesmen of old. And if too many practices are labelled as mindfulness then it can't be anything special. But perhaps the real barrier is that it isn't something you get from explanations of theory, it is something you can only experience by doing - a "praxis" you need to practice.

But why practice mindfulness? Most commonly it is positioned as being about well-being. But, to me, that is simply one subset of outcomes that may flow from the practice. I see mindfulness as essentially about intentional change - whether that is in well-being, in performance, in personal behaviour, or in relationships. I'd go further and say that mindfulness is essential to intentional change.

Mindfulness means paying more attention to what is really going on, both externally and internally. It takes us off "auto-pilot" so that (a) we become more aware of the choices we have in front of us and (b) we make our choice consciously rather than by unconscious reflex. In other words, we can act intentionally, with full awareness of our actions.

Conceptually this sounds simple - and it is. But it isn't easy! Neuro-biologically it means more processing in our Pre-Frontal Cortex (which is the part of the brain where we make conscious decisions based on our imagination of possible future consequences). Unfortunately, the PFC is a very energy (resource) hungry processor and our brain has evolved to try and avoid using it. Our tendency to be on auto-pilot most of the the time is actually a very energy efficient design! This tendency becomes even more extreme under stress (ie threat), when the chemicals produced literally shut down PFC processing as an unnecessary "luxury".

And this brings us back to the reason for practice. In a calm moment when we are not stressed, and when we are able to spend the energy on doing it - and often with someone else's help - we can all become mindful and plan to do things differently. But change only happens when we can take our intention into real-life and interrupt our reflex reaction "in the moment". This interruption is what needs practice. It literally builds new brain processing capability, in the same way that physical exercise builds new muscle.

So whatever you are trying to change, start a daily mindulness practice (eg go to http://mindfulnessatwork.com) and see what happens.

Performing at altitude!

I've had a long break over the London 2012 summer, so it's a while since I've blogged. But I think I have a good insight to kick of this new season - at least, it has been really helpful to me!

In the last two weeks I have been working on programmes with very senior participants who appeared far less skilled than you would have expected from people at their level, especially around building relationships, understanding the politics of the situation and exercising influence without direct authority. What became clear in our work was that they already used these skills in getting to where they were, but something was now de-skilling them - that something being what you might call the "altitude" of their situation.

Let me explain the reference. I am not a rock climber, but a friend who is once told me that climbs are rated for difficulty on two measures. One is technical difficulty and the other is "exposure" - essentially a measure of how scary it looks and feels. You could call it the fear factor. Climbers recognise that what seems easy at one height becomes almost impossible at another. Even without going into the brain science, we all know this from experience. Imagine walking along a bench one foot wide but only one foot off the floor - no risk, no fear, so no problem at all. You know that you'd probably even be happy to jump up and down, joke around, stand on one leg etc, all without falling off. Now imagine that was the one foot wide top of the parapet surrounding the viewing platform of a great tower - you probably wouldn't even get up there, and you certainly wouldn't mess around.

So take this back to the senior executives / partners I was working with and look at some of the key skills they needed to use but weren't. One of those skills is keeping your attention focused on the other person when listening. Not exactly a new concept for them. But what happens when you suddenly realise how important this conversation is? Let's say the other person is a global CEO of your key client, you only meet him once a year, other people are watching how you do - you'd better not screw it up! It's hard not to start thinking about what you are going to say to impress them, what you have to offer, how you are doing so far etc. In other words, all your attention is on you! So guess what, you've already screwed it up!

Another skill is seeing things from another perspective - again, not rocket science and something every successful executive can do. But what if the stakes are really high? Ultimately the other person's view is something you're imagining, whereas your own view is the reality you see. Are you really going to trust your imagination over your own perception? No way! So your ability (or agility) is gone and you are stuck in your own world view with no sensitivity to how it looks to others. Again, that's not a recipe for success.

The last example is the skill of using non-rational data, in other words your senses and your intuitions. This is also something that nearly all successful people can do to a greater or lesser extent. But for many, it is yet another skill that deserts them just when they need it most. When the situation feels high risk, we may sense that a particular action is right, but we won't actually take it until we have checked out our instincts with rational analysis. And that brings two problems. One is that the moment for that action may have passed before we've finished thinking. And the other is that our rational brain is not well equipped to give us the right answer. So what we feel is reducing the risk of getting it wrong is actually increasing that risk. 

So what? What can you do about all this? Well, I suppose the benefit of this insight is that once you recognise the true problem, you can find the right solutions. You don't necessarily need to learn new skills, you need to do two other things. Firstly, you need to work directly on the fear factor, by learning how to monitor your state and use appropriate techniques to manage it. Secondly, you need to make sure that certain skills you do have become such ingrained habits that they do not desert you even at altitude - and you do this through conscious developmental practice.

It sounds like the approach of a top athlete, doesn't it. Which is not surprising, because they know better than anyone that once you have reached a certain level, it is not your technical skills that limit you, it is your ability to use them when it matters most.

Coaching as reverse hypnosis

Although it's been a while since the last post, I am going to write about the same theme - perception!

What is prompting me is a recent conversation about whether the impact a particular programme has on participants is effectively a form of hypnosis, ie it is the programme leader's planted suggestion that creates particiapants' reactions.

What that set me thinking is that, as a coach, I am often carrying out what I could call reverse hypnosis. I am undoing the self-hypnosis that causes people to see things that are not actually there, but are simply creations of their own mind (ie their own particular psyche).

Because these illusiory creations are what stop people changing in practice. Their inability to do things differently is a perfectly rational (and sensible) response to what is sometimes to a completely irrational (false) perception. Once we have found a way to break their irrational perception, they have relatively little difficulty in doing things differently.

It's like if a stage hypnotist creates a suggestion to someone that an object is red hot, they will not touch it - in fact it would be insanely irrational for them to touch it. You would be reckless (and probably unsuccessful) if you tried to help someone overcome their reluctance to touching things they thought were red hot!

In the same way, if someone's psyche creates the illusion that a particular situation or person is highly dangerous, you would be reckless (and probably unsuccessful) if you tried to persuade them to ignore the obvious threat they can see. What you have to do is help them break the illusions of their self-hypnosis, so that that they no longer see self-suggested threats only genuine ones.

If you can do this, a different reaction seems so obvious that sometimes people are not even aware they have changed their behaviour. In their mind they continue simply to respond rationally to each situatioin or person that faces them.

But what has fundamentally changed is that they are now seeing reality rather than an illusion.

The neuroscience of self-fulfilling prophecies

More and more I find my coaching is as simple (or hard) as helping people take a different perspective and/or change their focus of attention. Last week I was discussing this with a colleague (a proper neuroscientist with a PhD etc) and she gave me a neat neuro-biologically informed explanation of how to discover what change is required by thinking about your strengths.

The basic neuro-biology is that we literally see what we focus attention on, and are correspondingly "blind" to what we are not focusing on. So changing perspective and shifting our focus of attention are actually both about altering our perception. Once we see / perceive the situation or the person differently we can act / react differently. So far, fairly obvious.

The interesting bit is that by thinking about your strengths you can quickly identify what you habitually pay attention to, hence what you will typically be blind to and how you will tend to mis-interpret what you do see. Knowing where you habitually focus attention makes it much easier to shift it elsewhere. And knowing you have a (literal) blind spot is an essential first step towards seeing what is in it!

The easiest way to explain this is with an example.

Suppose your strength is that you are decisive and action oriented. This suggests you pay a lot of attention to looking for decisions to be made and actions to be taken. As a result, you see lots of decisions to be made and lots of actions to be taken. You are literally blind to other possibilities. So you carry on making decisions and taking actions - because that's all there is to do! From another person's perspective, of course, you may appear to be over-using your strength - they may see you as too dominant and/or too hasty.

Take this further, if you mostly pay attention to decisions and actions you will only see those aspects of other activities (or other people) that affect the decisions and actions you are paying attention to. Nearly everything else - even a suggestion that you pause for thought- will be seen as either a challenge to be overcome or a delay to be avoided or ignored. And, of course, if all you are seeing is your decision or your action, it's actually true - that is the self-fulfilling prophecy, ie "What You Get Is What You See".

So how do you get to see a more complete picture? The answer is to shift your focus of attention. Practice asking yourself: "What if a decision or action wasn't the only thing needed right now, what else might be needed?" or "What if this other activity / person was not just a delay or a challenge, what else might it / they be offering that is helpful?". It's that simple.

However, if your brain is telling you that even pausing to think is a delay, it won't necessarily be easy. That's why you have to practice!

Integrating Siegel and Rock

If you want to know about the brain in relation to leadership, or development of leaders, then the best two books to start with are David Rock's "Your Brain at Work" and Dr Dan Siegel's book "Mindsight". They are both fantastic at filtering, applying and making sense of the vast amounts of neuroscientific research being generated every day.

However, they have always seemed to me to be approaching that research from completely different viewpoints. David Rock's writing has been mostly about how we can use knowledge of the brain to improve our thinking. Dan Siegel's work has been about how we can use knowledge of the brain to change unhelpful patterns of behaviour. Now I find they are mutual fans! Let me give two examples from a David Rock presentation I attended yesterday.

The first is Rock's explanation of why awareness of neuroscientific research helps leaders. The hard data in research creates a willingness to look at how our brains work, it also creates a language for talking about it. This allows better self-regulation, which supports better adaptation of our behaviour to the situation (flexibility). Importantly, Rock explicitly saw the link between better self-regulation and better adaptation as being better integration of brain function. This is Dan Siegel's entire focus - his work is all about various forms of mindfulness and physical practices which integrate the brain.

The second is Rock and Siegel's collaboraion to produce a list of 7 things you should do every day to maintain mental health - the "heatlhy mind platter". Google it for more details, but in outline you need: Sleep time, Physical [Activity] time, Focus time, Down time (relaxing, preferably not with TV), Play time, Connecting time, and Time In (his word for internal reflection or mindfulness type meditation - the opposite of Time Out). And both of them are clear that the last is one of the most essential.

Talking about feelings vs speaking with feeling

It's amazing how often we make exactly the wrong choice about which of these to do!

Let's look first at talking about feelings. Sometimes we think we should do this when we feel something is (emotionally) important to us. And yet it can sometimes fall strangely flat so that other people just don't seem to engage with it. This is actually not surprising. As a physiological effect, when you name an emotion you reduce your own (and others) emotional response to it. It seems that in naming it you objectify it, so that you do not experience it. For example, in saying "I'm really excited" you lose some of the feeling of excitement. So you don't want to name the positive feeling, you want to talk with excitement about what is making you excited. You DO want to name your negative feelings! For example, saying "I can feel I'm starting to get really angry" actually lessens the anger. Yet in many management meetings I've been to, it's the "I'm excited" comment that gets said a lot, and the "I'm getting angry" comment that is taboo. With predictable consequences!

Contrast that with speaking with feeling. This is what we do when we allow our feelings to show in what we say and how we say it. Colloquially we say we are speaking from the heart. This intensifies the emotional impact not just on you but also on those listening to you, through the power of limbic resonance. This ability to speak from the heart is something all good leaders need to develop. Yet too many still see that being business-like and professional means speaking without feeling. Even worse, they can try to talk in a business-like way about things they actually feel strongly positive about. Oh dear! Perhaps they are afraid the feelings will overwhelm them or others. But if the feeling is getting too strong, and becoming overwhelming, you can always use naming to bring it back under control.

So to paraphrase a famous prayer, you need courage to speak from the heart (ie speak with feeling) when it's helpful, humility to acknowledge your emotions (ie talk about feelings) when they are not, and wisdom to distinguish between the two situations.

What are you afraid of?

I've been musing a lot about fear in the last week - it's always present in our work (and in our lives) but often below the level of our conscious awareness. I've been focusing on it more consciously because of a series of workshops I've been giving looking at behaviour from a neuro-biology perspective. Fear (avoidance of threat / danger) is one of the primary organising principles of the brain.

Fear can be a useful stimulant. At reasonable levels, it certainly mobilises us to action. Unfortunately, the brain chemicals which stimulate action have the side effect of disabling new thinking. So we are energised to act, but on instinct or habit rather than by conscious choice. This is why people rarely find original or creative solutions under stress or in a crisis - they simply do more of what they have always done. Look at the Financial Services industry in the last few years (or European politicians in the last few months). Part of a leaders job is to decrease, not increase, the fear. Yet few seem to know that this is what they should do, let alone how to do it.

Fear is decreased when we recognise it. Too often we attempt to suppress fear by denial, or by using another covering emotion like anger, which only makes the brain's fear response stronger. To really free ourselves from fear, we should actively look out for it and name it when we feel it. It seems that in recognising our fear, we are also recognising that the threat is in our head rather than external. As the old phrase goes, "there is nothing to fear except fear itself". In other words, what we fear is our interpretation of the situation rather than the situation itself. This is why re-framing also works so well as the second step in reducing fear - it changes our view of a situation so it is not a threat but an opportunity.

Fear can even be what stops some people coming to coaching or from exploring their deeper issues within the coaching. For example, there are the generic fears associated with the Centaur character styles, ie fear of looking foolish / vulnerable, fear of the coach's disapproval, fear of being seen as ordinary / worthless, or simply fear of being seen at all. (I've only listed four, as the fifth style's fear - fear of being ignored / deprived - is not likely to stop them entering into coaching, though it may stop them resolving their issues and thus ending the coaching.) Like a leader, part of the coach's role is to recognise and help decrease the fear, so as to enable new thinking.

So I believe coaches and leaders both have to be comfortable with fear. What are you afraid of?!

Reflecting on mindfulness

This post is also prompted by the recent AC conference, this time inspired by a great session on mindfulness from Dr Michael Chaskalson. The more I find out about (and experience / practice) mindfulness meditation the more I understand why its popularity is growing so fast, and the more I see its value to us as coaches (as much as to our clients). Here are a few key take-aways from Michael's session.

I loved his de-bunking of the idea that mindfulness involves complicated techiniques or secret processes. Explaining the basic principles, he said "the main thing is just to be here" - by which he explained that he meant here in this moment, as opposed to "on autopilot" whilst we are thinking about some other moment in the past or the future. It's so simple - though it's not always easy. And, for me, it's so much what we need to do in coaching. When you can be fully present with your client, you find amazing things can happen very quickly (see an earlier post about doing 10 minute coaching sessions on a stand at this year's HRD conference).

I liked his clarity about the purpose of meditation: "mindfulness practice leads to an emergent property of mindfulness in everyday life". This echoes Dr Dan Siegel's definitions of the mind and the healthy mind. Siegel's definitions would explain mindfulness practice as like an exercise to make the mind healthier, in the same way physical exercise makes the body healthier. Must be a good thing!

Lastly, I found Michael's personal style in leading a breathing focused mindfulness exercise was very helpful to me. I often find it difficult to focus on my breathing without then taking conscious control of it, ie starting to consciously decide how deeply and how fast or slow I "should be" breathing. This is exactly why breathing focused meditation is such a good exercise for me - I can practice being with something and giving it full attention without immediately doing something to it. And it's easy to follow his guidance on how to turn the 10 minute breathing exercise into a "one minute meditation" for busy executives. Just start as usual... and stop after one minute.

Is the mind simply "a placeholder for the unknown"?

Last week I went to a mind-blowing 2 day lecture on the subject of "Why Psychotherapy Works" by Dan Siegel, a leading figure in the field of inter-personal neuro-biology and the author of Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist and other titles. Of course, before this event, I couldn't explain what I mean by mind-blowing - I can now!

The first and most powerful thing Dan gave us was his definition of the mind. We all talk about it a lot, but what is it? As one of his psychiatrist colleagues put it to him, "we use this word simply as a placeholder for the unknown". To Dan Siegel the mind is:
(1) "A self-organising emergent process for regulation..." A terrible but well-established (and accurate) phrase borrowed from the field of complex systems theory (mathematics). The process continuously develops from the interaction of elements of the system, and loops back to regulate further interactions of these elements;
(2) "...of the flow of energy and (hence) information..." Again, not using energy to have some vague and mystical meaning, but referring for example to electrical energy passing along neurons in the brain, chemical energy used to transfer information across synapses, and kinetic energy used to transfer information from one person to another (in sound waves etc);
(3) "...within the body (brain and elsewhere) and relationships." This is the most elegant piece of the definition - once you accept the idea of looking at the mind in terms of energy and information flows, it is obvious that these do cross from one person to another. Psychologists (and coaches) have long understood the importance of relationships to the developing and adult psyche (ie the mind), but most other "scientific" approaches to the mind have excluded relationships by putting a hard boundary at our skin.

This definition alone (given in the first session before coffee on the first day) made the event worthwhile. But after coffee, Dan gave us his other fundamental definition, to answer the question: What is a healthy mind? He says that a well-functioning mind is one that is well integrated, not just metaphorically but structurally / physically. Things are integrated if they are both differentiated and linked - avoiding being either rigidly connected or chaotically disconnected. This is another wonderfully elegant definition - simple, yet incredibly powerful when you apply it to explain both what can go wrong and how you can improve things.

Using these two definitions as building blocks, the rest of the two days was a tour de force - bringing in ideas from fields as diverse as mindfulness meditation and quantum theory (for once talking about this with an accurate understanding - it's a pet hate of mine how many people use and abuse the ideas of quantum theory). Please do google Daniel Siegel to explore his work in more detail. Enjoy!

Can you always see the limbic at work?

This was a great question asked by a friend during a discussion about the dominant role the limbic plays in shaping behaviour. We'd been talking about the limbic as the centre of emotions in the brain, and his question was seeking to exlore an apparent contradiction for those people (like himself) who are very grounded and rational, rather than emotional (in Centaur terms the Warrior types). Does that lack of emotion mean that for them, the limbic is not engaged and not in control?

It's true the limbic is the centre of emotions in the brain, but it is more than that, it is a pattern recognition (and ultimately a pattern creation) system. It takes data from our senses and virtually instantly concludes (by pattern recognition) what sort of a situation it is that you are facing. It's response to the situation limits any subsequent cognitive thinking, for example by connecting only to "useful" memories of similar past situations. So this is why we talk about behaviour being driven by patterns in the limbic.

In the character style which is wedded to rationality it is the limbic which decides there is no place for emotion in this situation and which limits the thinking to gridded logic. So it is the blocking of emotional intelligence which itself demonstrates the limbic at work.

A common experience of the Hero and Superhero

I spent last weekend with a psychology learning group looking at behaviour through the lens of "shame" - an enlightening perspective! It triggered a lot of new insights, one of which was about the place of shame in the Centaur character styles of Hero and Superhero.

Both types know about shame, and about it's antidote at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is pride. The difference is that for the Hero, shame and pride take centre stage at particular moments, whereas for the Superhero they are existential - a part of their way of being. The Hero character style can sometimes act very aggressively to avoid the shame of failure and sometimes display "true" pride in the achievement of success. The Superhero is similarly aggressive in protecting themself from the deeper (primary) shame of not actually being a superhuman, and needs to maintain a virtually permanent display of "false" pride.

Two things I took from this analysis. One is an explanation for why people so often incorrectly point at a male Hero's behaviour and say "he must be a Superhero" - the Hero's aggression or their pride can look very similar from the outside. The other is real empathy with the Superhero - our common experience of shame and pride means I understand what it can feel like on the inside.

New (neural) paths through the wood

Talking to a colleague I used an analogy to describe the process and impact of our coaching which they really liked and suggested I share more widely. I don't think it is original, but I do think it is quite useful / helpful.

We were talking about patterns of behaviour being determined by the neural pathways in the brain, and I suggested that these neural pathways could be represented by paths through a wood. Our repeated pattens of behaviour are like the heavy traffic of repeated journeys which create a broad clear path that is easily followed. In fact the path would appear to us to be the only route through the wood. The coaching process is like helping somebody strike out directly through the undergrowth to find a new route through the forest. Lots flows from this analogy, both about the process of coaching and it's long term impact.

The coach may not know any more than the coachee the exact path we will take, or even where it will end up, but their job is to stay close and give confidence that it is ok to keep going. As an experienced guide they may play a big role in clearing some of the tangling undergrowth, and they may suggest changing direction or retracing our steps if it looks like we're in danger of getting lost.

And once the new path has been taken, for a while at least, it is clearly there to see as an option. The more times you take that option, the clearer and more permanent that new path becomes. But if you don't ever choose that path it soon grows over and disappears again. And this is exactly what happens literally with the neural pathways created by new ways of thinking.

The other "Three R's"

I watched a TED/U-tube video the other day of Dan Siegel talking about his idea of Mindsight. Whilst it wasn't up to the best of TED talks (so didn't get added to the other neuroscience links on my main website) I did like his basic idea that schools should change their focus.

Dan's argument is that they spend too much on the three R's of Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic - a purely rational focus. And not enough time on the other three R's - Reflection, Relationship and Resilience. If schools were really training people for life - or indeed future leadership roles - these latter three would be central to the curriculum.

"Until one is committed"

I promised to write about the coincidence that when you open yourself to positive possibilities they "magically" appear, and it seems appropriate to make this the first post of the New Year. My title comes from an often quoted passage about this by William H Murray, who goes on to explain rather poetically that: "The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too" and who also quotes Goethe that: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it".

And by coincidence (!) at Xmas I received a lovely update from a client I worked with a while ago which illustrates perfectly this effect. I'll try to tell their story without giving away too much that is personal. When we worked together, the explicit goal was around achieving a senior level promotion. However, what became clear very quickly was that they were frustrated in many aspects of their life (reaching the point of depression). They dd not enjoy work and did not actually want the promotion. But it was "the devil they knew" and there were "no other options out there". They could only see the negative possibilities in uncertainty, not really believing that there could be positive possibilities in taking risk (ironically also the reason they were unlikely to get their promotion). So they sat waiting for the right opportunity to change their life to appear - and of course it never did appear, because they literally could not see it.

Then, after some fairly serious personal development (not with me - we agreed it wasn't right for our coaching contract) they made a move to another company. It wasn't the perfect job, and it wasn't that different a company. So, rationally, it wasn't opening up anything. Their old mindset would have dismissed it as pointless - in fact they had rejected this offer several times in previous years. But their new mindset was: "Who knows? At least I'm doing something positive and there's a chance something will come out of it". And then, the kicker. A few months into the new job, an opportunity did come their way through one of their new colleagues. This was a different type of job, in a different sector of the industry. They tell me it is perfect for them and it is going great. Yet when I first met them it would have been an option dismissed as an unrealistic dream, and they wouldn't have registered it even if they'd heard about it!

So that's how it works - attitudes and beliefs held deep in your limbic brain constrain your thinking and put filters on your perception which change and shape actual future possibilities. It's easy to accept as common sense that: "If you don't believe it can happen, it won't". What's harder to accept is that: "If you act on the belief that it can happen, it just might". But it is the same process.

Some things defy rational explanation

I'm not just talking about strange coincidences. I may write in the New Year about the coincidence that as you commit to opening yourself to new possibilities, so they suddenly appear. but to me this is a coincidence that is easily explained rationally. It's another case of perception creating reality (or the "what you see is what you get" effect I have written about before).

No, in this last post of 2010, I am thinking about how there are many things whose essence is not fully captured by rational explanations. Rational explanations by their nature are created in the Left Brain and so are all about using "either/or" logic to categorise, put into sequence, limit the set of possible outcomes etc. And while these are usually helpful, sometimes they just don't capture it all.

The specific event which triggered this reflection was trying to write a paragraph to describe my coaching approach. I realised that however I worded my rational explanation, my description diminished the work - not just because I lack the writing skills but because the left brain process of analysis inherently cannot capture some key elements. It is like describing a dance purely as a series of steps. It would be accurate, but it wouldn't capture everything. That's why the judges on a programme like "Strictly Come Dancng" comment on things like musicality, the mood of the dance and the connection between the couples, rather than just on the footwork and choreography.

So just as my coaching often uses right brain approaches such as images, metaphor and story within the work, I realise I need to be comfortable to describe my approach to coaching using these tools. Not just in order to explain what I do to clients, but to embrace better the non-rational aspects.

The metaphorical image I am playing with is of a labrador dog with glasses (and a PhD in psychology) - friendly, trustful and attentive, if a bit excitable, yet with real depth of emotional intelligence and insight. What do you think? Is it just too soft?!

To improve thinking... try listening

I was talking last week to a friend who runs his own (non-coaching) business about taking time to think. He was explaining that things were going really well but that he was so busy he never felt he gave enough time to thinking about the strategy.

We talked about how the brain tries to avoid thinking (see earlier posts / David Rock: "Your Brain at Work") and also about the often-suggested idea of setting aside just 10 minutes each morning for some quality thinking. He said he'd tried that, but once he'd set aside the 10 minutes he hadn't known what he should start thinking about.

Hearing him talk, I had the sudden realisation that the way we talk about thinking doesn't communicate very well what we should be doing to improve its quality. Because the most powerful thinking isn't with the conscious brain, it is with the unconscious. And, in fact, you have to quieten the conscious brain to allow yourself to hear the creative thinking your unconscious brain has been working on. There's a great chapter in the recent book ":59 seconds" by Richard Wiseman which describes an empirical experiment to demonstrate this.

So 10 minutes quality thinking is really about 10 minutes quality listening... to yourself. Sometimes a coach can help with that listening process, especially if they understand the power of simply paying attention (see Nancy Kline: "Time to Think"). But the individual can also do it themselves. All it takes is regular practice! It may be another reason why practices such as mindfulness mediation, yoga, Tai Chi etc are growing in popularity. These practices are adopted not just for health or spiritual development, they can also help you think better.

So that is my thought for the day: quality thinking time should be renamed quality self-listening time.