Is It Worth Listening To Your Brain All The Time?

How we react to threats – and whether listening to your brain is always the right way to respond

Did you know that when you react to a situation, you have two possible responses – one from the rational part of your brain, and one from the impulsive area? When you’re in amongst the weeds of daily tasks, it’s easy to let the impulsive one take over; but that can lead to bigger problems. Knowing about it is half the battle, though – because then you can start taking conscious decisions to change it. Here are a couple of examples of how your brain reacts to threats – and when not to listen! It’s the difference that a considered reaction can make between managing and leading.

Giving in to Temptation

You’ve got to put some time into planning a major project, and you decide to do that first thing in the morning before your meetings start, and while it’s quiet. But a temptation in the back of your brain tells you to take a little look at your inbox, just to check there’s nothing urgent in there. When you finally look at the clock, you realise that most of the free time you set aside has disappeared, and you won’t have enough time to get stuck into your project planning before your first meeting. What’s worse is that none of the emails you dealt with was particularly urgent, either – so you go into your meeting feeling cross with yourself, and annoyed that you still haven’t got that big task cracked.

The Ripple Effect

This is naturally going to influence how you approach the meeting you now need to attend – you’re feeling frustrated with yourself and your failure to do what you promised yourself you would. The meeting is with a member of your team, whom you’ve tasked with creating some new objectives in line with the project you still need to plan.  You know what you want them to look like, but part of their development is to come up with new ideas; and you’re determined to be open to their proposals, because you know that’s the best way to empower them.

But in spite of all your good intentions, you just can’t see the merit in what they put forward. It’s not anything like what you had in mind, and you’re feeling disappointed and cross that something else this morning is not working out as planned. Without thinking, you criticise what they’ve done – perhaps a little more harshly than you normally would – but tell yourself that you just don’t have time for this to go wrong, and that you really need to get back to that planning job. And now you can; but you’ve got a team member who feels confused, unappreciated, deflated and rather hurt, which is now going to impact their performance for the day too, and perhaps your relationship going forward.

Which Self do you really want to be?

It’s a human thing, and we can’t avoid it – but this internal struggle goes on inside us every day, at home and at work. You may think that you have one brain taking all the decisions, but in reality your decisions come from two different selves – one of which you probably like more than the other.

The self you want to be – intend to be – says that you will do that planning job in the first hour of the day. It says you will listen attentively and curiously to your team when they come up with their own ideas. It says you will do the workout, drink the smoothies, and go to bed in good time every night. It’s calm, self-assured and makes good decisions, and it’s the one you want to show to the world.

Then there’s the other self – the one that comes from your sympathetic nervous system, and reacts to protect you when there’s a threat. It’s brilliant if there’s a wild animal about to pounce, but less helpful when the threats are more to our sense of worth – and unfortunately, both types of threat are processed in the same place. This means that the response your brain generates is likely to make things worse, because the threat is just not the same as the one it thinks you’re facing.

So you’ve responded in a way you wish you hadn’t, and then things get even worse – because your highly evolved brain starts to justify why you did it, to make you feel that it was the right reaction after all. Your brain will think around the whole situation and come up with denials, excuses, blame for others and downright avoidance to silence that inner critic – the one that’s telling you it really wasn’t the right thing to do. Doesn’t that all sound exhausting? It really is, and consumes a lot of your attention and energy.

How Not to Listen

So what can you do about it? It’s hardwired into us, so there is very little you can do to change how it all works. But what you can do is observe these two conflicting selves in action, and then make a conscious decision to align your actions with the right one; the self that will give you the outcomes you want. The self that isn’t just a manager, but a real leader.

So, watch out for those times when you feel negative emotions welling up – that rising impatience and frustration – because it’s highly likely that your brain is tipping towards that self-preservation zone. And when it happens, ask some questions from your rational self – what is your responsibility in this situation? What can you do to get the outcome you want? Keeping the focus on your role, and not what others are doing, will help to silence that voice trying to blame others for what’s happening, and justifying the reaction you will regret later.

Knowing yourself, observing it and naming the emotions as they arise are major tools in your ability to manage your reactions, and create the successful outcomes your rational self wants – meaning you can be that transformational leader you want to be. Those truly great leaders understand that they need to observe and manage themselves every day to allow that rational self to rule.