Inspiration   •   3rd January 2018

You don’t have to drill into someone’s brain to know how to tap into it.

I was first introduced to neuroscience concepts in 2006 as they applied to executive coaching, at first, and later to leadership. In the 20 years I had worked up to that point, I hadn’t heard much about scientific research in many corporate learning programs (despite having attended a lot!). While much of what I attended may have been based on research or science, rarely was that shared or discussed. As I’ve worked with and shared neuroscience concepts over the last decade, I’ve seen the interest of neuroscience and the presence of “applied neuroscience” practitioners continue to grow. It seems you can’t read a magazine or channel surf without seeing a reference to the brain. I think that’s a good thing.

As I began to learn about neuroscience and the brain, I started to better understand why some of the approaches I had adopted over the years were successful and why other approaches were not so successful. Neuroscience was explaining things in a meaningful way for me as a leader, manager, facilitator and executive coach–in a way I hadn’t heard or seen before. Some of the most basic and foundational ideas have profoundly changed my thinking and behaviors. They guide much of what I do and what I share because of how effective they’ve been for me.

The most foundational of these ideas is linked to Evian Gordon’s research (see his Brain 1-2-4 model). There’s not a day (or moment) that goes by without me thinking about the brain’s primary organizing principle–minimize danger and maximize reward. This is our brain’s operating system. It is designed to keep us alive. It is a primal and instinctual driver of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It operates at an unconscious level, meaning it makes decisions for how we interact with the world without our conscious awareness! And we are (generally) more prone to move away from danger than we are to move toward reward.

Understanding and applying that one primary principle can fundamentally change the way you interact with others. When you understand how easy it is to trigger a “threat response,” you begin to change how you show up with others.

What does “showing up differently” include?

First, it’s authenticity. We hear a lot about integrity and authenticity. From an applied neuroscience perspective, I’d say authenticity is about consonance (as opposed to dissonance), meaning all the mechanisms we use to send a message are in alignment–our words, our tone, our posture, our other nonverbal cues are all matching. If something were to be out of alignment, it could create dissonance. That also includes all parts of the message being in alignment, nothing out of place to distract the brain.

Our subconscious brain is constantly monitoring the environment to the tune of 40 million nerve impulses per second. If something stands out from the ordinary, it gets the attention of our anterior cingulate cortex, which plays a central role in our error detection system (among other things). This can trigger a low level threat response, which in turn will diminish executive (cognitive) function. So when you show up with your team in a way that creates dissonance, you can lower their collective cognitive function (meaning, your behavior can make them less smart).

The second thing about showing up that’s critical is how you manage another person’s brain’s social needs (read Matthew Lieberman’s book, “Social”). Social needs (what I call food and water for the brain) are primary drivers of threat and reward in the brain. If you can remember to address (meet) the primary social needs of the brain of the person in front of you, you are more likely to diminish threat and create a safe space they can enter into with you. You don’t need to meet all of these needs, but intentionally addressing as many as you can creates a maximized reward state and a minimized threat state. That’s a good thing. People will move toward you. They will engage with you.

Another way we can show up with people has to deal with social regulation, which is helping others manage their own threat (emotional) states. There are times when we simply cannot eliminate threat. In fact, I’d argue that’s most of the time at work. Work is tough. It’s challenging. It’s stressful. But is doesn’t have to be unmanageable and overwhelming. Left to the brain’s whims, it gets that way quickly. Remember, the brain treats many things as threats and triggers our fight or flight response. But not everything at work is life and death, the way the brain thinks it might be. When that alarm bell rings in another person’s brain, we can ask them a variety of emotional regulation questions that aim to bring the PFC back into the game and diminish threat to the extent the person is focusing and proactively thinking, rather than reacting.

And a final thought (for now) about how we can show up is to pause before automatically responding to people and think, what is an optimal approach for the situation or conversation. Rather than go into automatic “tell” mode, you might be surprised how often you can ask some questions instead and let the other person do the heavy lifting. They’ll grow as a result and you’ll learn a lot about them.

If you want to know more about how to apply neuroscience findings as a leader or how it applies to different leadership or workplace topics, drop me a line!