In work as in our personal life we sometimes tend to let the old habits rule our behavior, for comfort we tend to codify certain responses into our “nervous system” and they become almost reflexes, that is what Stephen Covey would call Reacting (vs. Proactive) as his 1st habit of highly effective people (amazon).
A common example is when someone says a critique about our work, some people tend to think: this guys made a critique of my project, therefore he is insulting my intelligence, click, whirl, snap, I am very angry now at him and I should get even. Pure primitive reactions that get in the way. I describe some of the aspects of this in the 4 steps to talk to unreasonable (read stupid) people.
These responses help us save some time thinking, and were especially useful while living in the jungle, tiger roar, click, whirl, RUN! This was a simple environment, not much to think, so simple codification was very useful. Now that we live in more complexes environments, when hostility may not always be life threatening we need better responses, we need to go against our nature and break the habit and the reflex to introduce a previous reflection moment. We need to rewire our brains.
There is a very interesting bug, called processionary caterpillars, they have developed a technique of finding food, they follow the caterpillar in front, no matter what, forming long lines of caterpillars walking all according to the first guy criteria. One scientific called Jean-Henri Fabre once decided to test the limits of this bugs, he guided the front caterpillar (and therefore make the entire column follow) until he put the front one just behind the last caterpillar, forming a circle, there was no more front leader but no one bothered to wonder that, they just followed one another. They continued and continued marching; the scientist decided to put them to a test and placed food inches away. How long until they get tired of this and go to eat or rest? He left the caterpillars walking in the circle and he discovered something amazing.
The caterpillar followed the behavior for a week until starving to death, no thinking, just acting even if that means a slow death with food inches away.
Pretty similar to some behaviors we follow sometimes, when it matter the most, we tend relay more on hard coded behaviors, reacting and not choosing our actions.
We can connect this with the anatomy of the brain, were we can distinguish 3 main pieces. The cortex and neo cortex (rational thinking), the limbic brain (emotional center) and the automatic brain (breathing and basic functions center).
Usually when we think we use the Cortex, it’s much slower than the other parts and it needs to take breaks (like when you day dream) but it’s capable of solving problems, planning, and high level tasks.
When you connect a past experience to the present and act without thinking, that is when the limbic brain is in control, remember that dog that bite you as a kid?, every time you react to dogs with fear it’s for that reason, that is the limbic brain in full, it never rests, its 100 times faster than the cortex and it can highjack your entire body and cause stress, fear and other feelings.
There are many techniques to control yourself on this circumstances, and an entire set of books around Emotional Intelligence that connect to this, but the first and most step is to understand in ourselves the animal within so we can someday learn to tame it.
Have fun discovering it
Felipe
