Hero's Code

In Times of Change

Take a look around.  Right now we seem to have financial chaos just a step away.  Student’s are protesting, the weather is challenging many and too many of our sons and daughters are away at war.  Some are beginning to grasp that they will need to seek new employment soon.  It’s very human to feel fearful of what life appears to be bringing our way.

This morning I received an email from a therapist contact who works in the NHS.  I had asked her if she was interested in seeing a new version of some software they have been using clinically. This is software I had actually given free to her department a year ago.

Basically she said there wasn’t any point in meeting because the chances of her getting funding “in the present climate” was nil.  Her response was interesting because I had never even asked her to consider purchase.  Reading between the lines, it was clear that her total focus was on lack.  She felt that she had no personal power to change anything and was just being swept along with events.  Sound familiar?

The fear of losing control has been described as the strongest human motivator.  We want to feel in control of our lives and when we feel we cant, we just freeze; we no longer are certain of the outcome.  Most of us put pressure on ourselves and others in an attempt to master the events of our lives.  We mean well, but this only produces a temporary illusion of control - and gives us and those around us a lot of stress.

Many of us that interact with the NHS understand that many well-intentioned staff are under pressure to “do more for less”.  However the sad part is that the attitudes and beliefs being embedded and displayed are making things so much worse.  My contact failed to see her own part in making the present climate a reality.  She might be offended at the suggestion that she could share in the blame for the way things are.  The fault in her eyes was totally - “the others”.

It is a great truth that whenever we focus on what we need or lack we can so easily attract much more need and much more lack.  Energy always follows our attention.  We need to notice and manage the things we give attention to or our vital energy becomes drained; we become sluggish and we are beaten up by life.

Change visits us all, and quite often arrives unwanted and gives us a painful push in the back.  Change is indeed a force - the irresistible force - and we can remain victims of change or we can do our best to master it’s lessons.   According to biology, life forms that endured over millions of years did so by adapting.  Successful life forms had the intrinsic knowledge that the key to survival - the riddle of endurance - involved going along with change; adapting, transforming and even metamorphosing.

Faced with change most of us try to resist because we are unconscious slaves to our animal nature which deep inside drives us to seek survival.  How can we ever know what it is like to feel really alive when we are either fleeing or fighting change?

John-Roger suggested some principles to adopt so we can feel centred and in-spirit in times of change,

1) Accept all things - whether they seem good or bad - with no judgement or resistance (that’s a tough one!)
2) Cooperate with all things - you know you aren’t in control but it looks like you are
3) Understand all things - Understanding is not about being able to explain everything - just awaken and notice what is going on within you.
4) Have enthusiasm for all things
5) Have empathy for all things - know that others go through the same trials as you

The task of adopting these principles is extremely challenging.  But even taking a few steps to clear away our internal adversaries can have a massive pay off.  Anyone of us can consciously notice and inspect our attitudes and beliefs.  We can see where our attention is going and notice the judgements we make.  When we label situations as good or bad we are projecting our beliefs and confusing this as reality.  It would pay us all to actively choose useful beliefs.

Why doesn’t Mrs Smith help herself?

Going into the amputee rehabilitation centre today I saw a number of people – minus various limbs - sitting around outside in wheelchairs smoking. 

This is not unusual I have to say.  I am not a fan of smoking but it always strikes me as sad that people who have lost limbs due to compromised blood circulation aren’t motivated enough to eliminate smoking from their diet.  But when you think about, I am passing judgement from my viewpoint and I don’t have a clue how these individuals see the world.

Now I don’t wish to debate the rights and wrongs of smoking here.  I wouldn’t like to think that we start passing judgement on others too quickly in order to control them.  There is a great tendency anyway for more and more control applied to each of us for the collective good.  I don’t really want to debate that here.  I am interested in the attitudes and beliefs of people that lead to behaviours and consequences.

One of the challenges we face in the UK at least is that medical science allows many more people today to survive the consequences of, for example, peripheral vascular disease for longer.  This is surely a good thing. 

Once upon a time a person may have had a leg amputation and even after rehabilitation with a prosthesis or a wheelchair we would realise that prospects of survival would be limited.  Today however, we have leg amputees who are surviving longer – going on to have other higher-level amputations of the leg as well as having increased likelihood of arm amputations.  When blood flow is compromised it sadly affects all of the circulatory system.  Whilst prostheses and rehabilitation are improving it is always going to be a case of “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”  Prevention is what matters and one aspect of shaping that is to consider human behaviour and attitude.

What I did have the opportunity to do recently was discuss with a group of clinicians the motivation strategies that could be used with their patients.

Imagine you are a doctor - Did you ever have the feeling that you made strong recommendations to your patient, used your best possible words to “persuade” someone – and thought that he or she really got the point – only to find that your patient did not do what you recommended?  Probably a special strategy might help.

Sometimes it is very useful to find out how people are motivated.  Fundamentally, one way of thinking about this is that we all are moving towards pleasure or away from pain.  Put another way, we are

“Moving towards something“ kinds of people or “Moving away from something” kinds of people

My view – and just look around you to check what you think– is that there are many more moving away from pain kinds of people than moving towards people.   People mean to do things, say they will do things … and yet they wait and wait and wait.

There are those people who respond much more readily to running away from a threat than approaching an aim.  There are people that like to have a blank, clutter free, desk and others who simply don’t want to sink into total chaos as paper cascades from heaps piled all over the desk.

There are people who fill in their tax-forms to feel good that they have dealt with all of that in lots of time – and others who only respond at the very last moment when they realise that the pain felt by not dealing with this is now greater than the perceived pleasure that would come from doing something else.

There are people, who do sports to stay in good health – and others who do so because they would like to lose weight or have some other complaint go away.

And .. there are those who invest in pension plans to have a good time during retirement and others who are afraid of being poor and old.

So lets have a look at Mrs Smith. 

She is an “away from something” patient.  When you want to attract her with positive benefits such as “better mobility” or “improved cosmesis” it simply won’t work as well as if you came up with a different strategy that’s meaningful in her world.  For her, the new prosthesis will seem like gold if she knew that this prosthesis would help her avoid some dire consequence – like losing her other leg.  And remember that what would be a bad outcome for one person would be of no consequence to another.  It’s the individual’s perception that matters.  We have to be careful here about the ethics of scaring people I guess.

Mr Jones, who is by contrast a “towards something patient” would not be motivated by the same things as Mrs Smith.  He would be much more interested in the fact that if he had this prosthesis he would be able to join his daughter at her wedding next month or that this would keep him independent for so much longer.

For all clinicians, if you know how someone is motivated, life gets much easier.  You can avoid having to struggle with people to “get your own” way against the will of someone who simply does not and never will, see the world the way you do.  Compliance to treatment will grow once you meet the person in his or her own world rather than broadcast from the lofty position of your own.

And you know what, when you really think about this, it works not just with patients.  It works with doctors, therapists, assistants - and in the world outside. This even works with your children.

How do you find out if they are away from or towards something people?  Well, I suggest you don’t interrogate but instead use metaphor (story telling) or just get to know them by asking innocently about situations and see how they respond.  By looking for contrast we can easily see what works.

Why not start with yourself. Go back to a time in your life when you were really strongly motivated to do something and you actually took action.  Remember what it felt like? What did you see, what did you hear, what did you feel? 

Now just for contrast think of another situation where you just knew that something needed to be done – but you just procrastinated – you waited and waited until the pain of further delay just overcame your resistance to react.  Note again what you saw, what you heard and what you felt.  Notice that how we represent these situations in our physiology is completely different.  For now, all I can tell you is that with patients it gets much much easier if you are working with representations that motivate them rather than ones that lead to procrastination.

No Surrender

When should we compromise and when should we give in?  It is easy to believe that the only way we can live in today's complex world is through compromise. 

But hang on - there are two kinds of compromise. 

One type is the moment to moment blending of our words and deeds with the environment and the people around us. 

The second type of compromise is based on surrender or escape.  It's that time when we lack the energy or will to struggle through to the achievement of our goals, dreams and aspirations.

Most of the time, most of us choose to compromise on our dreams out of personal convenience, greed or simple laziness.  I meet a lot of people who want success but never quite manage to generate and sustain the self-belief, the excitement and the commitment to see things to fruition. 

As human beings of course we have the right and privilege to let go of our dreams but why do we do so this easily?

But there are complications.  Take me for an instance.  In my heart I know that for many years I unconsciously associated success with struggle.  This had the curious effect of driving me on to achieve success but denying me of any real sense of pleasure. The problem you see was that  by living with an association between success and struggle, I could never stop to enjoy the fruits of my labours.  If I wasn't struggling onward I couldn't deep inside believe that I was a success.  It took me a long time to choose a better way to compromise.

I chose to change my associations for better ones.  My intention has become to only work on fun projects with fun people - and it has been curious how more and more that simple intention has brought exactly those things into my life. 

In letting go of struggle I haven't compromised on my goals.  For my personal goals there can never be surrender and certainly no compromise.  My upbringing and my conditioning was to never accept compromise.  My karate teacher said that if you want to be great you have to work hard.  If your training partner works for one hour you must work for ten.  If your partner works for ten hours you must work for one hundred.  You know how it is when you have truly inspiring personal goals.  Working on them is fun and compromise out of the question.

Doing the wrong things - often

What would be the worst sin - taking action to convert what you know into a realworld result - and failing - or having the knowledge burning inside and never taking action in the first place?   

I for one have made lots of mistakes and although no one could be happy about that "in the moment," the truth is I have always managed to look back and realise that I had gained valuable lessons.

Mistakes have certainly cost me money, sleep and the colour of my hair.  I have a loving partner thank goodness and I fear that at times my entrepreneurial excesses may have been more stressful for her than for me.  The alternative of inaction and dreaming though would have been unthinkable for me. 

The belief I have is that people dont make enough mistakes.  We are taught at school to get things right and many of us were good at that, but in the world of business there are no well-conditioned problems or perfect solutions.  When faced with uncertainty many of us choose not to play the game and consequently never enjoy the special joy that comes from success that almost surprises us.

Bernie Siegel tells a nice story in his book "Prescriptions for Living." 

A comtractor was hired to pave a driveway in a neighborhood where he had never worked before.  He paved the driveway when the owners were away and then sent his invoice for payment.  The owner returned and somewhat surprised, called the contractor. 

It seems the contractor made a mistake and had paved the wrong driveway. Even though the owner offered to pay something, the contractor refused all payment saying that it was totally his mistake. He moved his equipment up the street and paved the correct driveway this time.

Do you think that the contractor suffered because of his mistake?  In actual fact, because of his actions the whole neighborhood talked of his correct behaviour and whoever needed a driveway in the area called this guy.  He had more business through his mistake than he could have bought with advertising.

Mistakes will be made if we want to achieve anything worthwhile and they are great opportunities to learn.  We need to be able to acknowledge our mistakes and say sorry when necessary.  And we also need to be able to forgive the mistakes of others.  But just a second - Now there are mistakes and there are - mistakes.  If we were learning to walk a high wire it makes sense to start with a wire that is close to the ground. That way a fall doesn't hurt.  We can fall often and just get back on the wire until we can traverse it in our sleep.

When we are ready to work at a greater height we can certainly look for a harness or a safety net, but we also have the confidence that comes from doing the wrong things lots of times.

Last winter in Wellington - Your personal Haka

One of the abilities that successful people have is an ability to trip instantly into a highly resourceful state. Sometimes that state might be relaxed and calm - other times high adrenaline.

On a trip to New Zealand I found a way to get into state that appealed to my love of martial arts as well as my interest in state mastery.

Ignite the Breath – States for Success
It’s a wet winter morning near Wellington. As the prison gates open the tattooed warrior approaches. Spring-like steps and moving rapidly toward us with his taiaha at the ready he halts now at the threshold. With wild-eyes and threatening gesture the line is drawn and a single fern leaf is placed for us, the visitors. My hair stands on end.

As the warrior withdraws from the line, our leader advances to lift the leaf. 
In the old days one wrong gesture now and all hell would break out here. The leaf is lifted correctly and we advance slowly forward.

Resourceful states
I am blessed to be able to work with some amazing people. Although I might be coaching them for their benefit it is impossible not to benefit personally. Successful people – particularly happy and successful people - always have strategies, and often-unconscious ones, that they are using to shape their lives and those of their publics.

I can just ask these folks, “Now just suppose I were you in this situation. If I had to be you, what would you be thinking and feeling?” A chance to step inside someone’s shoes and try bits of their strategies on for size is a real bonus. It’s not that I want to copy. Actually, there is always a way to just get better and better.

One thing I really like to know is how people get into resourceful states for great performance. 

The drum
Just recently I was talking with a friend about generating energy and excitement in the work place. I really liked what he did in his last company to get his sales people into state. David had a big Japanese Taiko drum on the floor of his open plan office. When one of the team made a sale they would rush over and beat the drum for a couple of minutes.

If you have ever been near these drums you can appreciate there is a strong urge just to beat them – it sounds good and feels good. It literally resonates through everyone and creates an instant physiological response. Everyone in that space gets entrained to the rhythm. Hmm.. maybe not appropriate for every situation but it certainly had a powerful effect.

Often we can see that even highly successful people use fear as a personal motivator. I coached a man who was Ernst & Young’s World Entrepreneur of the Year. He built a multi-national technology business from nothing and you would expect him to know a few things about facing entrepreneurial fear.

He commented that he could be in the darkest emotional space and know that in a few moments he would have to change his state and be upbeat in front of his management and staff. He focused on how he would be letting people down if he didn’t perform; his family, his friends, his team were visualized around him and from that negative space he found the energy source inside to perform. He had an unconscious strategy to engage overdrive.

So what works for you?

That day in Wellington allowed me to engage with a prison unit established to rekindle the traditional spirit and values of the Maori in those who have lost their roots. Far from being a soft option this was for the inmates a hard way of returning to spirit.

For many people the closest they get to the Maori way is to glimpse the All Blacks on TV. I think of Mr Lomu lined up to intimidate the opposition. Who wouldn’t be! The Maori haka is normally associated with performing a war dance. It is a generally recognised as a symbol of defiance performed on the rugby field by the All Blacks. Yet the haka has a number of deeper meanings.

HA means breath.
KA means to ignite, to energise.

Therefore HAKA can mean to "ignite the breath". 
A way to ignite the breath, energise the body and inspire the spirit!

A great Maori haka expert Henare Teowai of the Ngati Porou tribe said this about performing the haka

"kia korero te katoa o te tinana (the whole body speaks)".

When performing the haka the whole body literally speaks using the combined energies of movement, sound and emotion. Interestingly, reversing the order of the syllables in the word HAKA produces KAHA which means STRENGTH in Maori.

The haka, Ka Mate, an abbreviated version of which is used by the All-Blacks, was composed in response to a great personal challenge where the composer was facing possible death. The words invoke feelings of acceptance and resignation facing death that the samurai of Japan sought as the state of no-mind.

So what, you ask?
Well - Why not take the spirit of the haka to get into a resourceful state when you need it?
If I lead a corporate group through the haka they don’t need to be taught the meaning – they get it anyway.

Create your own haka. A personal ritual that ignites your energy and resolve. What thoughts and memories can you recall right now that put you in a powerful state of mind and body? Remember a time again when you felt really inspired? We all have lots of times like this. So what were you saying? How were you standing? Feel the energy flow through you once more.  Notice the feelings that swirl through your body and see them grow and grow.

Adopt these same movements, feelings and memories into your own haka sequence. It may only be a couple of movements with one or two key words. The intensity and passion is simply more important than the complexity. 

Use this ritual to ignite your breath and power up your energy against your own worst enemy. Yourself.

Psyche yourself up to be your very best.  Each day.

Kia rite, Kia rite
Kia mau Hii!
Ringa pakia
Waewae takahia
Kia kino nei hoki

Thanks to my friend and true Maori warrior Hirini Reedy for his guidance on Maori Warrior arts

Learning from sport - fear of failure

The world of sport is a very rich source of inspiration for business people if they choose to tap into it.  Many business people I know deserve to be considered as business athletes but many have much to learn about managing their personal energy levels for peak performance.

You know, we all tend to get so close to our own problems and issues that it can be useful to glance across at how a champion athlete performs under intense pressure.  These individuals know all about commitment, persistence and preparation and certainly know how to deal with the prospect of failure without fear. 

I was watching the World Athletic Championship over the weekend and it really changed my perspective on my own current challenges and issues.  It's a fantastic reminder of the importance of our state and its effect on performance.

Imagine the scenario. Thousands are watching you in the stadium and millions around the world are focusing on how you perform. As you are in the public eye, any hesitation or slip will be echoed in the newspapers and used to punish you time and time again - so you had better be good.  Why is that the human species will punish us again and again for every single mistake.

Let's say your event is the pole vault.  You have practiced for thousands of hours and the technical aspects of your performance are honed to a razor's edge.  You are physically fit and your opening attempt is sure to be well within your capabilities. And yet, as you stand on the runway you are vaguely aware of the signs of fear overtaking you.

Fear of failure produces tension; and tension constricts the blood flow and slows the reflexes.  You notice your breathing is much too shallow and this is resulting in  contraction of opposing muscle groups and a reduction in coordination.  As fear surfaces your clarity of focus becomes fuzzy.  You monkey mind lets random thoughts intrude and disturb the wellspring of your energy.

Your state - that package of what you feel and imagine, combined with that little voice of self-talk - is not as resourceful as it might be. Yet you know that you need to be in a 100% resourceful state to succeed with your vault.

With visualisation and mental rehersal you manhandle your state as close to 100% as you can manage and set off down the runway.  Soaring gracefully over the bar, everything looks great but sadly your trailing leg grazes the bar and in the last instant it is knocked down.

Here you lie - the bar is down and so are you. Your state is at 0% and in two minutes you have to go again.  And when you go again, because you are a high performer, you will get your state back to 100%.

This is the essence of peak performance. The ability to rapidly and effortlessly get to a 100% resourceful state at will.  As you are a champion in the making you use your two minutes wisely. You are in tune with your body and your mind. Change one - and you influence the other.  You know your stuff after all. All you need do is trust yourself. And yet trusting yourself just now is not so easy as it was on the practice ground.

You make peace with failure in this moment and break the cycle of tension and failure.  It is never enough to merely tolerate failure and it doesn't help to be angry with yourself. By recalling that life is all about learning from failure, and you have failed many times in training you recognise that this is no big deal. You adjust your breath. You love yourself as you recognise that flow state returning. You adjust your posture now and breathe calmly as the tension melts away.

Athletes at the highest level learn to make peace with failure. They treat it like an old friend playing a practical joke.

Just think about this for a second. The greatest inventors, artists, athletes - and business people have all failed many times.  The key is never to gamble with failure but to recognise and manage risk.

On my bookshelf are a number of books on the theme of "body-mind mastery" and one of my favourites in by Dan Millman.   Dan is a former world trampoline champion, martial arts  instructor and best-selling writer and has some interesting comments on the issue of fear of failure.

Dan notes that in his career as an athlete he would fail at least fifty times a day. Failure was simply recognised as an essential part of the learning process and a useful signpost to find out what was working and what wasn't working.  In the world of business it is unusual to find quite the same attitude to failure.

As young children, most of us of my age were taught to fear failure - especially public failure.  But isn't the devil in the detail?  Today our school system seems determined to avoid labelling students as failures - the lastest UK trend is to describe - after Herbert Kaufman - "failure is only postponed success.."

Do yourself a favour this week. Just choose to manhandle your state to maximum resourcefulness a few times. Before that important meeting, telephone call or presentation consciously apply the lessons of sport. Calm your breathing, relax your shoulders, change your posture to reflect the task. Your unconscious knows what to do. Use your own mind for a change.

Many successful business people I have met use a personal fear of failure to drive their success but this is not a strategy I recommend. 

An extremely successful client used his very real fear of "letting other people down" to drive his behaviour as a CEO.  The adrenalin produced by this behaviour felt good to him and his business results were special.  Unlike the physical athlete, this man had no way to burn off the habitual hormones of his behaviour.  We reflected together on how this way of influencing his state could lead to premature ageing, illhealth and even death.  We all have the means within us to be resourceful, successful and free of fear as we perform at our best.

The four agreements

I use a Mac computer, iTunes and an iPod.  I admit it.  Nothing would make me give up my Mac.  It would have to be the end of civilisation as we know it. 

It also has another advantage.  Although I love the look and feel of books, and I have only ever met one man that read more than me, the problem with books is the space they take up. My wife looks at me with despair when yet another book struggles to find a perch on our groaning bookshelves.

Have you noticed that downloads from iTunes slide electronically and easily into your home.  They take very little space.  Addictive though.

I was browsing the audio books section for a change and came across a download by Don Miguel Ruiz entitled the Four Agreements.  Originally published in 1997 I just found myself drawn to this and it struck me very powerfully due its simple yet powerful messages.

The basic ideas come from the Toltec indians of Mexico, who despite their ancient roots saw no difference between science and spirit.  Although we are slowly, in modern society, moving again toward such convergence, the Toltec saw all the universe as simply forms of energy many generations ago.

In his writing Don Miguel recognises the "domestication of humans."   The fact that all humans adopt attitudes and beliefs shaped by the dynamics of the various populations we come in contact with.  We don't choose these attitudes and beliefs but in some senses we adopt and agree with them.  Spookily like the Matrix of cinematic fame when you read it.

The thrust of the book is that we are not free but subject to this domestication that shapes so strongly what we believe is posible for us.  Frequently the result is a life of lack and limitation.

The four agreements are suggested codes to live up to that can guide anyone to experience a better life.
Agreement 1 - Be impeccable with your word.  Be aware of the importance of speaking with integrity. Say only what you mean and beware of the power of your words to damage and influence others.

Agreement 2 - Dont take anything personally - What others choose to say to you is nothing to do with you but simply a projection of their own world view - their own dram of reality.  When you choose to be immune to the poisoned words of others you will be free from needless suffering.

Agreement 3 - Dont make assumptions - Always ask questions to express yourself and clarify situations to avoid understanding.

Agreement 4 - Always do your best - The first three agreements are easy to say but difficult to live up to. Be prepared to stop and accept that your performance may vary from day to day. Simply promise yourself that you will always at least do your best.

I hope that if you are drawn to the idea of this book you take the time to listen or read for yourself.

Emotional memory shapes our results

As a business coach I am normally asked to focus on an agenda around business results.  Nevertheless working with people often brings up surprising differences in how people deal (or otherwise) with personal challenges.  We see the lesson time and time again that it is not really the situation that poses the challenge but it is the person's response to it.

Some years ago, I took part in a long distance mountain walk to raise money for charity.  Basically we were just a bunch of guys facing up to enjoying a lot of Scottish rain and a significant number of blisters.  We stayed in a variety of basic hostel accommodation as we travelled the country which invariably meant that we were all sleeping on pads in the same room. 

It was then I first learned the horror of sleep deprivation.  One of our number, George (a robust and well known local entrepreneur), had an ability to get to sleep within seconds and then keep the rest of us awake all night with thunderous snoring. 

After a couple of nights of this, one of our party, Russell, a manager at our local bank, could stand it no more and dragged his sleep pad outside just so that he could get to sleep.  When we told George about Russell having to move out, he could only laugh and hinted at a pretty keen emotional memory.  “Well that’s justice anyway – I’ve lost many a night’s sleep because of that f****** bank manager!” 

However it shows up in our lives, emotions such as fear have a very powerful effect.  Some authors refer to fear as an acronym standing for “Fantasised Experience Appearing Real” and we all probably recognise this as being pretty accurate. 

Although we all have different code words for fear and it’s maybe not always “cool” to acknowledge it, we certainly all have a deep knowledge of its effects.  In some societies openly acknowledging fear is not something we are supposed to do.  I was brought up in a society in which “Big boys don’t cry” and people keep a “Stiff upper lip”.

In order to feel fear, the fact is we are probably choosing to believe something which is not true.  We are choosing to form a mental picture that is nothing to do with current reality but everything to do with an imagined future scenario.

I was watching a documentary about Mohamed Ali recently which pointed out that despite his disability through Parkinson’s disease, he chose to believe that his God would never give him a test that he couldn’t cope with.  His mental picture of his disability as an opponent gave him the power to face his situation from a position of strength and challenge rather than weakness.

I’m a great fan of Sir Ranulph Fiennes who is one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever met and certainly the world’s greatest living explorer.  Ranulph didn’t succeed in his bid to trek solo and unsupported from Canada to the North Pole. 

He came back with a badly frostbitten hand that was still intensely painful five months after his return.  I’m sure that this isn’t a comment on his belief in the UK’s National Health Service, but he eventually resorted to putting his five frostbitten fingers into a workbench vice one by one and removing the blackened ends with a fretsaw. 

“If the finger bled or hurt, I just moved the saw up a little,” he said. 

Fiennes was happy that his handy-work had knocked thousands off the eventual surgery bill.  Whatever you or I might think, he saw (no pun intended) an opportunity where most of us would just see a crisis.

Scientists have now been able to determine how the brain shapes memories about significant emotional events.  This process is called the formation of emotional memory.  Many human mental disorders - including anxiety, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks – are the result of problems in the brain’s ability to control fear.  Although we are not so interested in these clinical issues today, the research that is going on can give us a better understanding of how fear surfaces within you and I and what the effects are.

Classical conditioning
Most of what we know about the links between memory and emotion come from work in the field of classical fear conditioning.  In this type of research a subject, often a rat, hears a noise or sees a flashing light that is paired with a brief (and mild) electric shock.  After a few brief experiences the rat quickly learns to associate the noise or light to the shock and responds accordingly.  Most importantly the rat learns to respond in the same way even when the shock is no longer given.  In other words, behaviour has been learned.

In the language of science the noise or light is a “stimulus” and the resulting behaviour of the rat is a “conditioned response”.  The delivery of the electric shock is termed an “unconditioned stimulus”.  Now conditioning of this type happens very quickly in rats – and in humans too.  Just a single experience of pairing a shock to a stimulus brings on the conditioned response.

Significantly, once this fearful reaction is established it becomes relatively permanent!  If the light or noise is then delivered many times without the shock, the rat’s response eventually diminishes in a process termed extinction.

Research evidence suggests though that the emotional memory formed through such conditioning is not actually erased.

What happens is that the brain somehow learns to control the fear response rather than actually erasing the memory.  The memory may still lurk there waiting to be recalled once again.  The fear response is lying dormant and may pop up again some time under even unrelated conditions.

Fear conditioning appears in just about every animal group that has been studied; it’s present in fruit flies and it’s present in people even though there may be some differences in the details of how it works.

Our response to fear
One of the popular scenarios used to describe the stress response – which is basically our fear response – goes like this. 

A hiker comes across a snake on a mountain path.  The instant the snake is seen, visual stimuli are quickly routed to a part of the brain known as the thalamus which acts as a rapid switching station that passes information to the amygdala which we introduced in Chapter Four.  The amygdala has long been recognised as an important brain region with respect to the processing of emotion and especially in moderating the storage and strength of emotional memories.

The thalamus seems to act only on fairly primitive information; perhaps by comparing a “threat” pattern stored in the brain with the incoming visual stimuli.  This quick information relayed to the amygdala allows the brain to trigger a response in the body by powering up the heart and the musculoskeletal system to respond to the threat.

Meanwhile the visual cortex also receives information from the thalamus and this, given a bit more time, actually seeks to determine the nature and extent of the threat.  It’s a more considered response.  The hiker is now “aware” not just that there is a potential threat, but that there is a snake on the path.  If through this process the hiker determined however that the snake was actually harmless and there was no real threat, the cortex could signal the amygdala to quell the fear response. 

This makes sense because failing to respond to danger is potentially more costly than responding inappropriately to a benign situation.  When your life is at risk, you don’t really need to know straight away whether the snake is a python or a cobra or whether it is red or blue.  Once you are at a safe distance you can consider that question safely.

What we can see here is that we have both a fast response and a slower response within our physiology. The fast response through the thalamus is based on very basic recognition of a possible threat.  Sensory input from the eyes, ears and so on is compared with a “database of threats” – the previously stored emotional memory.

The slightly slower and more reasoned response through the cortex and the hippocampus (responsible for learning of facts about entities such as people, places, events and things) has a chance to moderate our state.  If reason shows “no real threat”, then the fear response is quelled.

Early life conditioning
Science suspects that traumatic early life events may be significant in shaping our fear responses later in life.  You see, we seem unable to remember traumatic early life events because the hippocampus has not yet matured enough to consciously form accessible memories.  The emotional memory system develops earlier in life and clearly forms and stores primitive patterns of these same events.  These patterns are then not part of our accessible memory but they ARE part of our emotional memory.  For this reason, the traumas we suffered in our early life may affect mental and behavioural functions in later life through processes that remain inaccessible to our consciousness.

Can you see that a stimulus may find a match in the amygdala, stored decades ago and perhaps even by our genetic ancestors, that triggers a fast response because that stimulus is still recognised as a threat?  The information that should allow the response to be moderated through the cortex is not available.  That moderating information was never stored.

The creation of emotional memory has been linked to a process called long-term potentiation or LTP in which the neurotransmitter glutamate and its receptors bring about strengthened neural transmission.  Once LTP is established, the same neural signals produce larger responses.  Emotional memories may involve LTP in the amygdala where fear conditioning seems to take place. 

The fact seems to be that we are emotion driven and our response to the environment that we face each day is “programmed” deep within us.

Let’s summarise this bit of science. 

From when we are babies in arms we develop and store primitive emotional programmes that are basically about ensuring our survival.  The brain is learning to recognise “patterns” that represent threats to our survival.  When we are out and about in the world the part of the brain known as the amygdala matches our current situation with the stored patterns of threats.  If a “threat” is detected, a response is initiated and it is instantaneous. 

The amygdala sends a signal to our physiological systems to power up our fight or flight mechanism and it literally disconnects us from our higher consciousness – in other words it stops us thinking!  Every cell in the body responds to the stimulus.  When someone cuts you up in traffic and you respond with what later seems like “irrational” behaviour – it’s this process at work.

Our autonomic nervous system becomes out of balance as the so-called sympathetic pathway speeds up the body for high effort.  A million years ago, the effort of running away or fighting the threat would have burned off the adrenaline which floods into our system to allow this effort.  Today, there might not be such an opportunity and when repeated often, this adrenaline overload leads to increased risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, stroke and the many other consequences of imbalance.

The job of the so called parasympathetic pathway of the autonomic nervous system is to slow down the body systems and release hormones that naturally neutralise the adrenaline.  Relaxation and meditation can bring this about but only slowly and anyway we may not be able to relax when it is most needed.  It’s not just the autonomic nervous system at work – it’s the molecules of emotion we discussed earlier.  The hormonal system is slower acting but is extremely powerful and needs to be in balance too. 

We probably don’t yet know all of the hormones that flow to regulate our balance.  Two of the best known are DHEA which is associated with positive emotions, feelings of well-being and success, and cortisol which is associated with negative emotions, feelings of submission and despair.  It is no good taking DHEA pills (although they exist) because what we need is balance – both in the fast response autonomic nervous system and in the slower response of the hormonal system.

What the Institute of HeartMath in California verified scientifically is that the body has a built-in way of creating coherence and balance from chaos.

It seems that the heart is a powerful source of electromagnetic energy – much more powerful than the brain (1000 to 5000 times more powerful) and it can be used to send a signal back to the brain that quickly defuses the stress induced imbalance. 

As the heart beats it generates electromagnetic energy in a rhythmic way that can be seen as the familiar ECG waveform. The heart rate is a measure of how many heartbeats or cycles there are in a minute.  We now know that a healthy heart has a rhythm that varies smoothly.  Even when we are at rest, the heart rate speeds up for a few cycles and then slows down for a few cycles.  When we are ill or stressed this heart rate variability becomes chaotic or very uneven.

The act of putting attention to the heart in particular, and if you can manage this, generating and holding positive feelings there, causes the heart rhythm to change.  The heart rate starts to vary in a smooth fashion.   This biological rhythm is communicated to every cell in the body and literally entrains every cell and organ system to fall into step. 

As this smooth signal from the heart is communicated to the brain, the amygdala no longer seems to inhibit thinking.  Once again, we can regain access to the higher consciousness and intuitive, creative abilities of the brain.  This action of putting attention to the heart activates the slower pathway we noted earlier that allows us to access the cerebral cortex.  We actually see things in a broader perspective and miraculously this is a useful key to defusing stress, improving creativity and even personal communications.

Insights into the Complex Sale

Are you involved in high value sales with a sales cycle of months or even years?.

So am I - I haven't been paticularly good at it either in the past. I work with people now who are good and I stick much more to my strengths. The other day after a meeting with a senior officer in the corporate world he shared with me that he has been known to get as many as 200 attempted sales calls a week. Of course how many get to speak to him - zero.

So what do we do when we have a great product or service that we know that company XYZ would love?

Well there are lots of books, seminars, theories, systems and so on and I don't want to add to these.  However, I was inspired by an interview I read about a Hollywood script writer - Skip Press.  I wrote more here..

Derek Jones

Fear of Sales - Attitude Adjustment

Is there an easier way to sell when times are tough?

I try to go with the flow.

Having read the books, been on the courses, learned from the masters I had lots of sales technique but it still didn't feel right. I was allowing all of the techniques get in the way rather than help.

Here is a personal view that hints on the importance of attitude to sales success - and a few hints on how to start going with the flow without getting swept away.
Derek Jones