The Almond Effect

Kick Start 2012 with these Tips

2011-12-20T20:52:00.000-08:00

My gift of Tips and Strategies for 2012

Thank you for your continuing interest and feedback on my thoughts, tips and stories in using our knowledge about the human brain to develop better leaders.

The more we learn and discover about The Almond Effect and other neuroscience, the better we will become at developing and being change leaders.

In appreciation, here is an e-book full of tips and strategies from over 30 experts on how to make 2012 your best year ever.

Click here to download your copy. I hope you enjoy it.

I wish you and the ones you love a wonderful 2012.

PS If you prefer Facebook for CLUES and a whole lot more including discussion and ideas from other contributors, go to Anne Riches on Facebook and Like the page

Do you work with someone with Depression? Would you employ someone with depression?

2011-11-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

Statistically the chances are that you are working with a person who is coping with a mood disorder such as Depression or Bipolar Disorder or that you have recruited someone with this challenge. It may be that you are the one with the mood disorder or have a family member who is.

Recent research published in BMC Medicine tells us that 15% of the population in high income countries are likely to experience depression in their lifetime, with 5.5% experiencing depression last year. In low to middle income countries, this number is 11%. You can read the full text of the research here.

The experience of a Major Depressive Episode (MDE) is higher (over 30%) in USA, France and the Netherlands, and lowest in China (12%). The incidence of MDE was very high in India (over 36%) though the Indian Health Ministry is unhappy with that finding.

So potentially, 1 in 6 of your employees, your team leaders, your managers, your customer service representatives, your salespeople, your number crunchers, your lawyers (actually it's statistically much higher for lawyers), your safety staff in fact anyone in any occupation may be clinically depressed at work at any time.

Depression is prevalent in the best countries to live

In Australia the most often cited statistic is that 1 in 6 women and 1 in 4 men will experience Depression in their lifetime, an average of 1 in 5.

This is worrying given that the 2011 United Nations Human Development Index rates the five best places to live as Norway, Australia, the Netherlands, the US and New Zealand and the World Health Organisation suggests that by the year 2020, Depression will be the world's second global burden of disease. It already is for men and women between 15 and 44 years of age.

Do you have workmates who are depressed?

The symptoms of depression include poor concentration, lack of motivation, little interest in anything, low energy and disturbed sleep. Just getting out of bed, showering and getting to work can be a major achievement.

What is the impact of these conditions on the quality and quantity of work of your employees ?

Productivity, quality, safety and engagement

It is not simply a challenging health issue, it is a productivity, safety and indeed, an engagement issue.

Why engagement? Because Depression (and Bipolar Disorder) don't pick and choose where to land. They are prevalent. And may be impacting your best performers.

What you do to support them and the people around them, may be a critical factor in choices that your employees make to remain with you or move on.

How do you support depressed employees?

There is a range of alternatives available that can bring relief. They include the 'talking' therapies, i.e. counselling, working with a psychologist, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and so on.

Exercise is a powerful tool with research showing that 30 minutes of exercise a day is the equivalent of a dose of Prozac.

Mindfulness mediation is also being shown to be amazingly valuable.

But given that most people with jobs spend most of their waking hours at work, we have to think about the role of the manager and of colleagues and team mates – does what you do help or hinder recovery?

It’s nothing to do with me

If you don't think it's anything to do with you, think in hard terms of the bottom line. Ignoring it or even inadvertently making it worst, will impact your goals and the morale in your organisation.

In my experience, there are two main barriers.

First there is still such stigma attached to Depression that people don't admit to it. And if they do, people around them simply don't know what to do or say so they either do and say nothing or say things like 'just move on, get over it, don't bring it to work, there are 'plenty more fish in the sea', you'll find someone else, pull your socks up, it's not my problem, go and get a coffee, just take a few days off, take my advice and....' etc.

Underlying those thoughts is the notion that the person is just malingering.

But people don't choose to be depressed. It is an awful place to be. It is not something you can just 'snap out of' just like you can't just snap out of cancer or heart disease.

It is a medical condition. It is real but it is manageable.

Second, people are afraid to raise the issue. It's an example of what I call The Almond Effect. In this case, your amygdala warns you that by raising the issue you could be opening a Pandora's Box, that you haven't got time for it, that you might tip them over the edge, that they'll tell you that it's none of your business - all responses that you may not feel equipped to handle so we become fearful and don’t raise it.

But with 1 in 6 men and 1 in 4 women at risk, it is as significant a work issue as physical safety at work. It is not something that can be ignored.

What should you say or do?

One of the biggest fears is not knowing what to do or say.

I have given many presentations to CEO's, managers amd employees about the signs, symptoms, causes and treatments for Depression. Invariably these talks of themselves open up a significant channel for communication about an issue that remains stigmatised and troubling for employers and staff alike.

As a first step, provide your team with information and skills to work with colleagues with a mood disorder. I know that this will translate into increased productivity and engagement as people begin to understand the issues and how to help.

This is not just the right thing to do, it will produce tangible results on your bottom line. It gives real meaning and practical application to the words 'we care about our people'.

Tips:

* Don't ignore it

* You won't tip people over the edge if you ask them if they are ok

* If you don't know where to start, begin by simply asking them how they are feeling

* Go a little further by saying what you've noticed in their mood or behaviour and gently describing what that is

* Don't be judgemental

* Don't think or tell them they are weak. The strongest people I know are people with Depression - think what they have to manage each day to even get to work, let alone perform well

* Don't think you have to give advice – that’s not what they need

* Use all your best listening skills - use open ended questions and acknowledge that you are listening with your body language and eye contact

* Encourage them to seek help if they have not already

* Validate them. i.e. let them know that you understand that it is a real experience for them and that it’s OK to talk about feeling down

* Suggest they speak to their GP or to the workplace employee health services provider

What you should do next if this is an issue in your workplace

1. Invite me to give a free awareness raising session in your workplace

2. Contact me if you’d like more information

3. Visit the Black Dog Institute website for facts sheets and resources

Is technology dramatically changing the way our brains work?

2011-10-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

Do you have a bigger brain because you have a lot of Friends on Facebook or is it the other way around? Have a look at this interesting research from University College London.

If neuroscientists discover that our grey matter increases the more social networking we do - that will raise some challenging questions for employers around the optimal use of time at work for employees, won't it!!!

2011-09-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

My Tip for Procrastinators

I’m one of those people who love to get things done. Give me a big challenge or a difficult task to do, I’m on it!

But simple things like deciding what to get for dinner if my partner is home or what to wear? I can mess around for ages on those.

In my blogpost July 2008 I wrote about Procrastination and invited reader’s comments.

Could you live with this person?

Here is one person’s reply that made me think again about when and why I procrastinate.

“I have a close relationship with a person (my partner) however he procrastinates about everything.

If I ask what he would like for dinner he walks away pretending he didn't hear me asking him.

Anything that is in the "too hard" basket for him is left for later with some excuse.

There are broken things in the house that have been broken for years!

He was made redundant from his job a few years back and it took him nearly a year to finally pick a new job after many offers.

We have been together for over 30 years and initially I put this behaviour down to laziness and it was the cause of many disagreements in our relationship.

After a while I got to understand his reasons even though he won't discuss them.

It comes down to this. If he does some of this stuff and it is not right then he is most fearful that someone will criticise him, even though he might be criticised for not doing it.

I believe that some of this is due to the relationship my husband had with his father who was a controlling man - best intentions I am sure.

There was a constant battle of wits in that family, hiding "stuff" from dad so he would not know about it and therefore could not comment. I think this learned behaviour and fear is one of those things that have become part of his nature. He knows about it but can't get past the reliance on blaming his behaviour on his upbringing and what is the "norm".

I have come to terms that he needs gentle coaxing and encouragement and a pat on the back when he does accomplish something - after all we are all babies in big people's bodies!

Thanks for the opportunity to comment. I regularly receive your newsletters and I really do enjoy reading them.”

Fear and perfectionism – the (im)perfect match

Wow – she must be a saint! That behaviour would drive me crazy!

Yet her comments stung me. Why - because I can make decisions and do most things quickly except writing. That’s a whole different ballgame.

I’ll research, get readily sidetracked, distracted, busy, in fact anything except writing and then, well, there’s another day gone and I still haven’t done the writing I want to.

I don’t believe I’m lazy or inefficient. Yet ironically a task that is not that difficult for me once I get going, has me running in search of anything else to do rather than the thing I should be doing.

Lots of reasons for it but in a nutshell, it’s your amygdala

Some authors suggest that procrastination is a time management issue.

Others talk about it coming from fear of failure, fear of success, fear of loss of autonomy, fear of attachment. Whatever it is, there is one common thread, fear.

For me, it is fear of not being perfect. Isn’t that ridiculous? Yet my perfectionism has been (and still is) the biggest personal challenge in my life. it stops me doing things.

It’s The Almond Effect® again. My amygdala believes that somehow if what I do is not perfect, I am in someway a lesser person and won’t be successful. Seems like madness to some but the frustration of procrastination is real.

What to do about it

And just as my wonderful correspondent observed of her partner, my father had a huge role to play in setting up this state of mind for me.

So some of you will belong to the ‘Socks’ school of thought - just pull your socks up and get over it. Easy to say if you’re not a perfectionist!

If only it worked like that. Behaviours built up over decades don’t miraculously change overnight.

In my experience, the best way to deal with it is the Nike approach: Just do it. If your world doesn’t fall in and no one gets hurt, it’s probably safe.

Gentle coaxing and encouragement and a pat on the back

The strategy that struck me in my correspondents note was what seems like a statement of the obvious but often simply not done: coaxing, encouraging, supporting and acknowledgement.

This approach works for change leaders as well as in the family. Set up the opportunity and persuade resistors, recalcitrants, procrastinators to try out the new ways of doing things in the development stage and before you go live. It can work wonders.

And if you encourage, support, and recognize their achievements you often turn your most reluctant participants into advocates.

Just do it

But for me, this quote from a University of North Carolina article sums it up:

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair  — Mary Heaton Vorse

That’s just what I did to write this CLUES and I think that applies to everything we put off doing!

Daniel Goleman describes The Almond Effect

2011-09-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

The August 2011 newsletter from Six Seconds reports how Daniel Goleman describes what I call The Almond Effect. Great description.

He describes the neurological response to stress, or a threat, as a pure survival mechanism designed to guide us through “a short-term emergency” which has evolved into “an ongoing hazard for performance.” This ongoing hazard is the neurological spiral of stress that has us trapped.

Goleman explains that our “attention narrows to focus on the cause of the stress, not the task at hand; our memory reshuffles to promote thoughts most relevant to what’s stressing us and we fall back on over learned habits. The brain’s executive centers – our neural circuitry for paying attention, comprehension and learning – are hijacked by our circuitry for handling stress.”

Thus, we’re stuck until we become aware of our own stress spiral. Those with more emotional awareness and stronger skills in managing feelings are able to turn this cycle around more quickly.

From a neurological standpoint Goleman notes, “people who can manage their emotions well are able to recover more quickly from stress arousal.” Once we recognize that we’re on a destructive path, we can actively work to retrieve the brain’s executive centers from the stress spiral and begin to make better decisions.

As Goleman describes it, our “attention becomes nimble and focused again, our mind flexible, and our bodies relaxed. And a state of relaxed alertness is optimal for performance.” Thus our stressful situation becomes more manageable and the bigger picture is once again visible.

If you are a regular reader of these posts, you will know that using my STAR approach Stop - Think - Act - Rewire develops the skills to be able to manage stressful situations (The Almond Effect) not only while they are happening but also to better handle future triggers. STAR builds self-awareness and confidence and an ability to deal with what life throws at you. That seemed to me to be the best reason to develop it!

I remember it like it happened yesterday...but you probably don’t!

2011-08-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

“We’ve tried that before”

“Here we go again”

These two phrases torment every change implementer’s life. They usually signal negativity to the change that you want to instigate.

And these words are not only used by change resistors at work, I’d guess many of you have heard them or even used them yourself at home!

Researchers such as Lila Davachi who study the way that memories are formed and later recalled, say that it is rare that we accurately recall exactly what happened in the first instance. This is because a memory is not a single function or brain system/network.

For example, even if you were close to and witnessed a powerful event like 9/11 or your colleagues made redundant in a restructure, your memory of it might not be as clear as you thought.

There’s a great illustration of this written by Greg Boustead in Scientific American How the brain remembers 9/11

It is an example of Davachi’s explanation at the NeuroLeadership Summit in the USA that memory is never an exact playback of the video of the experience. Rather it is a reconstruction of the event drawn from many different parts of the brain.

And because memories are not stored in a single location, when we ‘remember’ something, we may not remember or recall accurately all the elements of the event.

This topic was discussed at the World Science Festival 2011 in the session on The Unbearable Lightness of Memory

"One of the primary functions of memory is to be able to use our experience of the past to be able to act adaptively in the future" – Elizabeth Phelps

"When we remember an event from the past we are drawing on information that we've actually experienced BUT sometimes we're combining that incorrectly with other things that we may not have experienced. These mistakes can have important consequences, especially in the legal world." – Daniel L. Schacter

We increase the durability of a memory if it has an emotional connection

Some research has been done to show that memories formed in the presence of negative emotions are more likely to be recalled clearly.

Think about your holiday last year. You probably don’t recall the detail of the logistics that went well. But you will definitely recall where and when it went wrong.

For example, earlier this year I travelled in Europe and Africa. I can barely recall the details of the check-in counters in most airports but I can remember the one in Morocco.

I clearly recollect that the check in woman in Marrakesh said: Would you like me to check this through to Johannesburg for you?

And that was the last I saw of my bag for three and a half weeks!

I can easily bring to mind the emotion, the frustration I felt that my bag was lost. And the memory or the whole saga is triggered every time I see an Air France plane or advertisement – guess which airline I flew?

But it would be fascinating to see if my memory of the check-in woman’s words and how the situation was ultimately resolved is accurate.

Overcoming past memories of change

The job of the amygdala is to watch out for signals that might compromise our safety and survival. That’s what The Almond Effect® is: when the amygdalae confuse the actions and behaviours of others in a non-life threatening situation as a threat to our physical survival and cause us to act accordingly with one of the 4 F’s.

If you add this together to what is known about memory recall, then you have to have a plan for what can you do when you hear words of resistance based on perceived history.

Your goal is to reduce the fear, anxieties and stress being stirred up by past memories. Until you do that, the limbic system and especially the amygdala creates a smokescreen which logic and reason will find hard to get through.

As a first step, my suggestion is that you simply accept that their negativity is being triggered by memory whether it is accurate or not. It won’t help if you tell them they’ve got it all wrong. That’s an appeal to their logic at a time when their evolutionary survival instincts are on red alert.

Instead ask them and any others who were around at the time of the previous events, what happened previously or what recollections are triggering their views that it’s all been done before. Then check that against any known facts about the event.

Maybe they were right on the money but I’d bet that their recall of the event will reveal differences between what was happening in the past and what you are proposing now. If they were right then you’ve got some valuable information to work on to ensure that your change activity this time is different and won’t arouse the same negativity.

But if you can show them the difference and explain in positive terms why what is being proposed now is different to what they recall happened last time, you’ve enhanced your chances of change success.

Until a pill is marketed for eliminating particular remembrances that we’d prefer to forget, it’s worth operating on the premise that many of our recalled experiences are based on the feelings we had at that time, not necessarily the facts.

Learning how to deal with these emotions that accompany change will significantly enhance your ability as a change leader.

Getting People to Change

2011-08-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

When would you give up your passion? How would you feel if someone told you that you had no choice?

This happened to a good friend recently. She was told that for health reasons she would have to stop scuba diving, at least in the short term, maybe forever.

It was heartbreaking for her. As a keen diver myself, the thought of not being able to explore below the ocean’s surface is simply awful.

Change is hard work whatever the situation

The mechanisms for changing what we love to do or are simply comfortable with, are the same in our personal lives and at work. We have to rewire our brain. We can do this because our brains have plasticity.

The nature and intensity of our motivation to change will differ in various circumstances but regardless of our reasons for wanting to change behaviours or thought patterns, we will have to create new neural pathways and then to use them in preference to the old ones.

Until the new patterns become the new default response, it is hard brain work. Think about when you are tired and how easy it is to default to established patterns.

The old patterns are seductive

For example, when we had our kitchen renovated last year, I still found myself looking in the old place where the cutlery was kept until I got used to the new location.

And recently I was driving back from a meeting in Sydney’s northern suburbs to another at Rushcutters Bay in the East. Coincidentally it’s the same route as if I was going home. I was so busy thinking about what I was going to say at the meeting that I was driving on auto-pilot. I missed the turn to the meeting and found myself on my way home!

(Then I experienced The Almond Effect® and became anxious about being late and the impression that my lateness might create.)

Some other examples: using your old phone’s commands on a new phone, using old keystroke patterns on new systems at work, using approaches that used to work with your our old boss on the new one!

And maybe there are some things that are so hard-wired that people can never change. I am thinking here of a friend from Scotland who has lived more than 40 years in Australia and still has a really strong Scottish accent!

When we have to change, and even if we are strongly motivated to do so, we need to stay actively focused on changing our behaviours.

If not, you may find yourself in a situation where the old behaviours are triggered automatically and the old behaviours reappear.

Our autopilot at work

Many managers seem to overlook this. They become frustrated and impatient with the time it takes for people to adopt change at work.

They get tired of answering questions like:

But what about…? What’s wrong with the existing way? We’ve tried this before, what makes you think it will work this time?

Many questions are rationally based, yet many more have an emotional basis.

As managers, getting commitment to change requires us to respond to those emotion-based concerns even though we are under time pressures and deadlines. It is false economy not to do so.

Successful change leaders know this.

Failure to address the emotionally based questions results in delayed or failed change efforts. After all, these questions are triggered by our amygdala which are concerned with anything that doesn’t fit the existing patterns we know are ‘safe.’

We still see more than 40% of change projects failing to realize the projected goals of the change.

IBM identified the most significant challenge to change as Changing Mindsets and Attitudes in its Global Study Making Change Work 2008.

In a 2009 survey of CEOs, IBM identified Complexity as the number one challenge for CEOs and leaders currently.

Here is one of their recommendations:

“How CEOs can capitalize on complexity:
The effects of rising complexity calls for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organisations for twenty-first century success”

So even if Complexity is the number one challenge for leaders, dealing with it may require changed mindsets. Many executives will have to change their own behaviour as well as the behaviours of others.

How do we change ourselves and others?

It’s worth remembering that:

• Humans are hard wired for survival above all else

• Our default thinking is habitual and self-perpetuating

• Everyone is the product of their own experiences with different motivations and unique memories

• Change can be frustratingly slow because it’s hard brain work to rewire – even if it is logical and in the best interests

So to create the optimum conditions, change leaders should:

• acknowledge past patterns were OK at that time

• fully explain the ‘why’ of the change, the WIFM and ‘what will happen ‘if we don’t’

• understand “once is not enough” and send consistent change messages in multiple ways through multiple channels on multiple occasions

• model change – and be congruent

• focus on the emotional side of change; don’t just ‘install’ the new system or process or procedure

• use reward and recognition continuously to embed new brain patterns and behaviour

People don’t change behaviours easily.

This is especially true in workplaces with cultures and histories that are slow and resistant to change. A structured approach and full understanding of how people change is essential for managers and other change agents in today’s fast-moving world where ironically slowing down to get people on board, might be the optimal way to speed up.

As Marilyn Ferguson said:
“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.”

The Keys to Resilience, Happiness, Self-Confidence and Compassion

2011-06-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

There were some interesting 'off the cuff' comments from some Presenters at the Happiness and its Causes Conference in Brisbane recently.

Let me share some that might be of value to you in your work as Change Leaders.

Dr Jane Goodall

It's a pity we've lost the concept of the elders. Then we used to ask 'What are the consequences of our actions for our community, our world, our future? Now we ask: what will make me happy now?

Matthieu Ricard (inspiring!)

Compassion without wisdom is blind; compassion without action is sterile

Dr Robert Biswas-Diener

Life is beautiful because it gives us second chances - until we get it right

Dr Anthony Grant, presenter ABC Making Australia Happy

Eight steps to happiness:

1. Write your eulogy (clarifies your goals and values)
2. Do random acts of kindness
3. Practice mindfulness
4. Identify your strengths
5. Practice gratitude
6. Forgive
7. Develop social networks
8. Reflect, review and renew

Roko Belic, filmmaker The Happy Movie

Everything we do in our lives affects someone. And if it doesn’t, it affects you and that eventually affects someone else

Professor Paula Barrett

The brain continuously forms new cells no matter how old you are as long as you are well, get plenty of sleep, eat a good diet and exercise regularly. (i.e. neuroplasticity)

Michael Rosengren

Ideas for building resilience:
* Develop the skill of 'savouring'
* Spend one hour a week to do something for someone or a cause
* Physically move for one hour a day
* Be present (eg being on your phone when you are supposed to be engaging with someone else or in meetings etc is disrespectful)
* Have someone to love and something to do or to look forward to.

Dr Russ Harris

Self-confidence does not mean no fear or anxiety. Confidence is a cognitive state.
It’s irrational not to be afraid but you can control and manage it.
Genuine confidence is not the absence of fear and anxiety; it is your transformed relationship with it

Sarah Wilson

Negative thoughts are ‘stickier’ than positive thoughts

Dr Paul Eckman

Does being compassionate benefit the giver more than the receiver?

Professor Marco Iacoboni (one of the star presenters in my view)

Our capacity for empathy is hard-wired (mirror neurons)
There are degrees of empathy. We tend to be more empathetic with people or things that are like us

B. Alan Wallace (another fabulous thinker)

Humans can use intelligence to find other ways beyond appearance to find similarities and therefore be empathetic.

We are all creatures of habit but as humans we can choose the habits we want (neuroplasticity).

Professor Pat McGorry

Genuine happiness comes not from what we are getting from the world but rather what we are giving to the world.

Michael J Gelb

How to think like Leonardo da Vinci every day -

* Have an insatiable quest for knowledge and continuous improvement
* Learn from experience, be an independent thinker
* Sharpen your senses – pick up on what is going on around you
* Manage ambiguity and change
* Be a whole brain thinker
* Maintain body as well as mind fitness
* Be a systems thinker.

Should you go to the next one?

I enjoyed the Conference but I did not think it was anywhere near as insightful and illuminating as its sister conference Mind and Its Potential

But as with everything we experience in life, there is always food for thought if you look for it.

So I am confident you found some ideas that resonated with you in the above list.

And if you did, then the next step is: so what will you do with it? What do you need to do more of, less of or keep on doing and how will you hold yourself accountable for that?

Go well.

Tunnel vision of the grey matter

2011-05-15T22:35:00.000-07:00

Peter unashamedly was reading email on his Blackberry in a team meeting. He thought the meetings were a total waste of time. The team leader asked everyone for their point of view but, unless it accorded with his own, their opinions were ignored or worst still, met with a cynical or sarcastic remark or look!

As Peter said to one of his team mates: ‘The man has got tunnel vision of the grey matter!’

Interestingly, he may be right!

How our brain filters stuff out

According to an article in Wired by Jonah Lehrer there could be some truth in Peter’s comments. He has an interesting explanation for why we often see or hear only what we want to see or hear.

We know that our amygdala responds to emotionally significant events that involve some sort of threat to us. Our amygdala continuously assesses whether something is a true life/death or physical risk to us.

And because the amygdala does not distinguish between physical and psychological threat, it also actively assesses threat levels in non-physical risk situations like an email from a client, a look from a colleague or the words of the boss.

In both physical and non-physical situations, if the amygdala activates the threat response and we react without using our thinking brain (pre frontal cortex) resulting in inappropriate behaviours, I call that The Almond Effect®.

Sometimes our intuition is wrong

However it seems that there are times when we don’t want to accept what we hear or see because it doesn’t accord with our expectations or our reality, so our brain carefully edits them out, instead ‘searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe.’

Lehrer describes an experiment conducted by Kevin Dunbar in 2003 at Dartmouth College. Dunbar showed students two video clips of two different sized balls falling to the ground. In one clip the balls hit the ground at the same time. In the other the heavier ball landed first.
The students were asked to select the more accurate representation of the law of gravity.

Those students who were not versed in physics believed that it was unrealistic that the balls would land at the same time, an intuition that strikes a chord with me.
However it is wrong as the science shows (Galileo and Newton) that once the balls reach a critical velocity, they would travel at the same rates and so the scenario where they would land together is correct.

You and your ACC and DLPFC

The part of the brain that registers errors and contradictions is the ACC (anterior cingulate cortex). It gets turned on when we see or hear or in any way sense that something is wrong and doesn’t fit with our patterns of experience. I have heard neuroscientists describe it as the ‘Oh Sh*t’ response.

But Dunbar found that there is another part of our brain, the DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) that is also involved. When it is activated, it suppresses thoughts that don’t square with our preconceptions.

As Lehrer so eloquently puts it, if the ACC is the “Oh Sh*T” circuit, then the DLPFC is the ‘delete’ key.

Don’t waste your time arguing

Now maybe my DLPFC is helping me out here, but this seems like a great explanation about how people behave when they don’t seem to hear or see something that doesn’t accord with their point of view.

And perhaps, significantly, it’s the differentiating factor between managers who can master their DLPFC and say, ‘that’s impossible’ and those who say, ‘that’s interesting – I wonder why you think that may be possible.’

Clearly the latter attitude is the one more likely to be open to innovative ideas, solve difficult complex problems and demonstrate great leadership.

So maybe Peter was right and those meetings are just a waste of time if the boss is only interested in their own point of view.

I suspect we all suffer from ‘tunnel vision of the grey matter’ occasionally but at least you now know why!

And maybe we need to check our own DLPFC if we can't resolve a difficult sitation. Are we in fact stuck because we are filtering out other ways of looking at the situation?

Time to put the headlights on!

The only thing to fear...

2011-04-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

People in Burberry sunglasses and Victoria’s Secret lingerie are seen queuing for food and handouts because they lost their jobs, their homes, and their incomes in the Global Financial Crisis. Now even their self-esteem is at risk.

Radiation spews into the atmosphere in Japan. Floods in Australia cause drowning and destruction. People are butchered in countries ruled by dictators.

Tsunamis wipe out whole communities. Earthquakes crush the centres of cities like Christchurch.

The list goes on. And for a significant number of people the daily deluge of death, destruction and bad news is overwhelming and influential in their thinking process. They create fears and concerns. Even where I live, 80m above sea level, my neighbours are asking what we would do if a tsunami hit.

For particular personality types, anxiety takes hold. And for some parents it takes a big effort to maintain a positive outlook in front of their kids who are equally vulnerable to the images they see.

And then there’s work

Add another layer: unexpected uncertainty, or sudden and alarming change at work, the place where many of us spend most of our waking hours.

Job losses, restructuring, current boss leaving, a new boss, new corporate direction or new government policy, revitalized competitors, new products, the demand for more margin and reduction in costs – add your own example to this list.

Do these work-based experiences also affect the way you make decisions and how you interact with people around you – of course they do.

Six decades ago

All these happenings remind me of the words of Franklin D Roosevelt in his Presidential Inauguration speech in 1933. Although the global context was different (then the world was in the grip of the Depression), that sense of feeling overwhelmed, fearful and hopeless was as palpable as some people are feeling today.

You’ll recall Roosevelt’s words:
“...let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Roosevelt was talking about the consequences of The Almond Effect® though I hadn’t described it as that yet – in fact my mother was only 3!

And his words are as relevant today

As David Ropeik says in his blog post about keeping perspective on the risks of nuclear power:

“As powerful a tool as our risk perception system is for keeping us safe in general, sometimes that instinctive/emotional system can get risk wrong, in dangerous ways.”

As you know, in our limbic system, the amygdala is responsible for our feelings of fear. It functions as a kind of psychological sentinel, scanning every situation with only one question in mind: could it harm me or not? It’s the basic survival mechanism that sets off our fight or flight mechanism.

It served us well when we were living on the savannah plains. The trouble is, it is still functioning in much the same way today.

But it is not rational thought that dictates our amygdala’s response. Rather it is an instantaneous prediction based on experiences, memories and concepts stored away over our whole lifetime from everything that happens in every minute that we live.

Fear can make a hash of our response to change or even options for consideration

Neurobiologists have shown, using fMRI and CT scans, that rational, logical decision-making is inextricably intertwined with emotions. In fact, human beings are primarily emotional and secondarily rational, so, without care, emotions call the shots in business and in life.

At work, people resist change because of their fears around job security and the unknown. Underpinning these fears are ANTs (automatic negative thoughts) that could include concerns about capability to learn new skills, previous failures, more work, more energy, having to develop new patterns and routine to name a few.

The role of the leader is pivotal

I’ve been conducting some research over many years about what people want from their leaders in times of change.
Here are a few of the items on the checklist:

* to feel included
* to be treated with respect
* the truth
* WIIFM and to know where they fit in
* proof that the changed approach will work
* clarity of objectives and goals
* reasons for the change
* picture of what success looks like
* acknowledgement of past efforts and skills

The challenge for leaders is that often they don’t know all the answers about the change and unless they are self-aware with honed self-management skills, their own ‘almonds’ and ANTs take over. Their own fears and anxieties, even subtle ones, make a hash of their ability to make decisions, communicate wisely and lead change.

Where do you fit in all this?

So let me ask you right now to stop and reflect: does fear get in your way either at work or beyond? If I asked you to write down a list of things that could be impacting you, what would you write?

To what extent are your responses to others, your actions and words driven by your own deliberate or subconscious survival instincts?

Are you a leader who is providing what your team needs and wants from you?

Ticking the boxes of the checklist above is a great place to start.

I own you

2011-03-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Watching TV the other night, I gazed in disbelief as the Superintendent of a police station yelled at his people:

“I own you – I don’t care what you think. Just do as I (expletive deleted!) tell you.”

I was staggered. Even though it was just a show on the tele, do bosses still do that? Is that the way they think you get the best out of people?

I checked when the program was made – 2010. It’s usually a good program and the story line mostly believable – but did the scriptwriter base this manager’s behaviour in reality?

What do you think? Have you or do you experience this behaviour from your bosses? If you do, click here and tell me about it - I'd really love to know.

Exploring the House of Wonders

It made me think of a place I visited last month in Stonetown, Zanzibar – the House of Wonders.

It’s called that because it was the first building in Zanzibar to have electricity, and also the first building in East Africa to have an elevator...

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... which wasn’t working like mostly everything in Tanzania.

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In the House of Wonders there are many exhibits on Swahili culture, including a finely carved Drum.

Here's a photo (sorry about the quality) of the explanation of the carvings on the Drum.

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As you can see, it says that the Drum is an ancient Swahili insignia of power.

One of the inscriptions reads:

"Your action is a reflection of your leadership.
So call all the people together, including those who behave differently,
for the wise gathers all and satisfies them."

Clearly the Super on the tele hadn’t read that inscription.

What does motivate people?

Nor had the Super read what Dr Dean Mobbs, a Senior Investigator Scientist at the MRC-Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University UK says about the latest neuroscientific research on the mechanics of Motivation.

And the Super would not be alone. Most performance reviews systems have been designed without reference to what the neuroscientists are telling us.

I cause many an HR practitioner to raise their eyebrows when I suggest that most Performance Management systems emphasise the wrong thing.

Focus on performance that ‘has room for improvement’ or whatever muddying words the form might say, often engenders anxiety, even fear, for the recipient of such news, especially if salaries or promotions explicitly or implicitly depend on the Review.

And while it’s true that getting this feedback might induce short-term improvement, it’s unlikely to result in sustained motivation and commitment. The employee is more likely to be engaged in looking for a job elsewhere.

Our social brain is the driver

The research points to what is becoming more and more evident through Mobbs’ and other’s findings (and our own everyday lived experience) that the social environment is one of the most powerful contributors to how we perform.

I don’t mean how many morning teas we go to or drinks after work.

Rather if our workplace and the behaviours of others in it, appeals to the affiliation and feedback aspects of our social brain, we are more likely to try harder to consistently deliver up a good performance.

That’s because, for example as Mobbs says, when we:

* see those in our ‘in-group’ win
* help others and give advice
* work in a team
* hear people say nice things about us

the reward system in our brain is activated.

And we like to feel good, so we do more of whatever brings on that feeling.

Do you have leaders or troglodytes?

It is very easy to get seduced by the ‘system’ of Performance Management.

But like all change management strategies, if you want to bring about change, you need to focus on the benefit (the WIFM),the upsides for people to change their, often habitual, ways of doing things.

Our brains are hardwired to focus on things that scare us first – that’s The Almond Effect® in action – to make sure we take steps to survive.

But at work, life/death is not usually the issue – a positive environment and happiness is. Without them, employees and especially your best ones, simply go elsewhere for a job.

While many organisations are changing the structure and intent underpinning their performance management systems, you still need good leaders, not troglodytes like the TV Super, to implement them.

It’s a key leadership skill that is pivotal to motivating your people to perform to the best of their ability. And crucial to them being willing to change the way they do things.

So reflect for a moment: what does your performance management system emphasise and how well do your managers bring out the best in their teams?

And are you making sure that your organisation is utilizing the best means available to maximize the organisation’s results?

Do you worry about living up to expectations?

2011-02-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

You may be a successful manager or competent team member with lots of runs on the board. Your future career is looking good.

But even so, do you still experience moments of doubt? Do you ask yourself: ‘Am I good enough for this role?’ 'Will I stuff this up because I’m not ready for it?'

Or even this: “!@#^!----i shouldn't have taken this on - I’m in way over my head!

And are you reluctant to ask for help because you think you’re expected to have the answers and that others will think less of you if you don’t?

Do you get annoyed because people assume you’re too young for the responsibility, or perhaps too old?

Do you wonder where the fearlessness you had in earlier times has gone to?

Are you limiting your career prospects?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you may be on track to sabotage your potential!

Linda Hill and Kent Lineback, their Jan/Feb 2011 Harvard Business Review article say this:

Such moments of doubt and even fear may and often do come despite years of management experience. Any number of events can trigger them.

They go on:

Most bosses reach a certain level of proficiency and stop there ...too many derail and fail to live up to their potential. Why? Because they stop working on themselves.

It’s The Almond Effect® at work

When we are new to our roles we are constantly on the lookout for derailers, things that can go wrong. But over time, as we become more settled and comfortable in the role, we worry far less. In some cases, complacency sets in.

But then something triggers off the doubts, the niggles, the concerns, the worries about self-competence and capability.

It can come out of the blue or simply be the result of too much to do, too little time or too many other stressors in your life.

And these derailers come from past experiences and events where things haven’t gone as planned either for you or you have seen it happen to others.

Over our lives, a huge number of these warning signs get stored in our brain which if we haven’t mastered the STAR technique, can show up at any time with miserable results.

Can you eliminate the triggers?

Because those triggers are always there, you have two choices: eliminate them or learn techniques to manage them before they control you.

So can you eliminate them?

There is a lot of research into this, particularly in the context of post-traumatic stress syndrome. What a relief it would be for sufferers if the traumatic memories could be eradicated.

There is no commercially available means to do this at present. And if there was, the ethical questions would be enormous? For example, could someone who goes through a divorce have the memory of their previous spouse erased?

You may have seen the romantic drama film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) where this was attempted!

The challenge is that if you delete a memory, you delete a part of someone’s life. And learning from our past experiences is the way that humans learn and grow.

Neuroscience not Hollywood

Neuroscientists are making progress towards techniques to selectively master that part of our brain, our amygdala, whose sole job is to ensure our survival. It does this by recording all the times when we have been under threat and letting us know or warning us when the same or similar situation is happening again.

Drs. Roger Clem and Richard Huganir most recent study on this has expounded on earlier work (e.g. by Joseph Le Doux) that there is a window of opportunity when memories can be ‘de-potentiated’.

Clem and Huganir discovered in mice that readily removable receptors (the main chemical sensors that detect messages sent from neuron to neuron in the amygdala) are only present for a few days after inducing fear, and peak at around one day.

So if the same thing happens in humans, this may well provide a window of opportunity for removal of the fear inducing receptors. And hey presto, bad memory gone.

However as you can see this is fraught with what ifs, hurdles and obstacles before it can become a reality. Does the same thing happen in humans? How long is the window of opportunity? How finely can we pinpoint the memory? What are the side effects of any drug or physical intervention to name just a few.

And then there are ethical dilemmas, too many to start on in this CLUES.

You need your amygdala

You may have read about the case of SM who experienced such damage to her amygdala that was associated not only with a decrease in the experience of fear, but the absence of fear altogether.

There is a Catch 22 of course. As the authors (Feinstein et al) of the study note:

“The unique case of patient SM provides a rare glimpse into the adverse consequences of living life without the amygdala. For SM, the consequences have been severe. Her behavior, time and time again, leads her back to the very situations she should be avoiding, highlighting the indispensable role that the amygdala plays in promoting survival by compelling the organism away from danger. Indeed, it appears that without the amygdala, the evolutionary value of fear is lost.”

The only remedy now

So until such time as the memory specific neuro-pharmaceuticals are as available as Xanax or Ativan, the best way to control your career derailers is to learn techniques such as mindfulness and STAR – Stop Think Act Rewire.

They are going to be far more use to you in the short term and enable you to be the great manager and team member you can be.

Office Politics - ignore them at your peril

2011-01-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

“Feeling resentment is like taking poison yourself and waiting for the other person to die.”

Ponder those words. They are gold. Many have been credited with them but whoever said them originally was truly insightful.

How much resentment do you harbour? Especially at work. Is it harming the other person or just you?

Resentment causes heaps of stress yet so much stress at work is avoidable.

How? By understanding and dealing with the emotions and feelings that underpin office politics and developing an approach to minimise their negative impact on you.

I hate office politics

Many people say they don’t want to be involved in office politics. Is that you? Do you say ‘I loathe the politics’, ‘I avoid politics’, ‘I refuse to play politics?

If you do, that’s the equivalent of committing organisational suicide.

And if you are a manager, paying too much or too little attention to office politics means you had better start looking at the jobs vacant ads.

Poor engagement, increased internal competition, conflict, withholding of knowledge and information, lack of innovation, missed strategic opportunities, reduced productivity – these are just a few of the ramifications of not attending to negative political behaviour.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the impact on health, morale, trust and faith in the leaders.

So what’s at the core of office politics?

Self-preservation. Survival in the corporate jungle. Protecting your status and resources. Mimicking the behaviours of others to get the results you want for yourself.

Here are some examples of office behaviour that people shared with me recently:

* ‘Blatant favouritism/nepotism displayed by the 'leader' of the team’
* ‘Taking credit for something they did not do’
* ‘Manager using aggressive language to intimidate others to achieve own agenda’
* ‘People are afraid to speak up & voice their true opinion at risk of losing their jobs’
* ‘Power play within management affecting the success of the project’
* ‘Insecure boss trying to dodge criticism by lying about his staff’
* ‘Non-communication of important information’
* ‘Bullying, intimidation, spreading untrue rumours’
* ‘Pitting employees against other employees’
* ‘Denial of involvement in something that didn't go as expected’
* ‘Instructed to withhold information from Board’

Why do we do it?

We have to go back to the era of hominids to understand why people continue to engage in back-stabbing, manipulation and the ‘dark side’ of engaging with others; why people still become fearful, anxious, suspicious and cynical.

As you know, I call it The Almond Effect®. It’s when our inbuilt human survival system mistakes what other people are doing in the office for an ambush of sabre-tooth tigers.

So we react biologically to the threat as if the people were killer animals - though we modify our behaviour to fit the work environment.

We respond with anger, gossip, poor performance, back-chatting, presenteeism and withdrawal of discretionary labour. We close our doors, roll our eyes, miss meetings, deliver poor customer service and challenge everything the boss wants us to change.

It’s hard to believe that human relationships have not evolved since the era of Neanderthals. But we clearly haven’t in some regards.

Tips to survive in the office jungle

Understanding and managing The Almond Effect® - it drives much of office politics - is the critical first step in successfully navigating your way through your organisation’s political environment.

That and some other important strategies to shore up your career.

Here are some:

If you are a manager:

* Examine your own contribution – ask yourself: ‘what would it be like to work for me?’
* Set the standard and walk your talk
* Do not tolerate bad behaviour even from your most productive people
* Delegate effectively and don't meddle
* Ensure accountability goes with responsibility
* Create psychological safety for your people to talk to you

And as an employee:

* Performance is not enough – you also need EQ
* Inter-personal relationship skills are essential
* Check: Are you consciously/ subconsciously a contributor to office politics?
* Manage your emotional brain
* Build credibility through visibility and integrity, not negativity
* Grow your networks
* Manage upwards
* Maintain perspective: fight only the battles that count and let stuff go

She broke my heart

2010-12-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

You damage your health if you don't have social relationships according to Matt Liebermann.

At the 2010 Mind and Its Potential Conference, Liebermann said the damage was equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

In fact, he said, sociality is not an accident – it is ancient and by design.

We had and still have a much better chance of survival if we are not alone.

It still holds true today

Think of how animals hunt – they search for and pounce on the loner, the one separated from the group.

And reflect on the language we use as we encourage people to sign up to our point of view or pitch: “there’s strength in numbers”; “we can’t go this alone”.

Consider also the stories of babies who don’t thrive when they are deprived of social connection. Click here for one commentary that reflects on what happens.

Amygdala can’t tell the difference

So if sociality is critical to our survival, perhaps that’s the explanation why our amygdala can’t tell the difference between social pain and a threat to our physical existence.

The Almond Effect® is all about that – our bodies jumping into survival mode, fight, flight, flock or freeze, when our amygdala perceive an emotional or mental threat (e.g. your boss’s raised voice, an irate customer, the exclusion by the team, running late for a critical meeting), yet none of these are likely to result in us being wounded or injured physically.

The way we talk about social pain reinforces our amygdala’s inability to discriminate. We use the language of physical pain: “She broke my heart, you hurt my feelings, I’m gutted.”

Learn to accept the things you can't change

There are many tools we can use to manage the social pain we feel, The Almond Effect®, both at work and beyond.

One critical tool for me is the use of acceptance.

So for example, one of the best ways to deal with ongoing challenges at work, is to accept that work will never be completely harmonious and free from irritations and politics. To believe it will, is simply living in a false reality.

I came across these words ascribed to Fr Alfred D’Szouza. They sit above my desk and I reflect upon them daily to help me accept and deal with social pain and my ‘almonds’. I hope you find them useful too.

For a long time it had seemed to me
That life was about to begin – real life;
But there was always some obstacle
in the way.
Something to be got through first.
Some unfinished business,
time still to be served,
a debt to be paid.
Then life would begin.
At last it dawned on me
that these obstacles were my life.

Then you can move on

In other words, once you have accepted the situation, you can do something about it.

There will be more about strategies on how to do that in future CLUES.

Geoff Huegill triumphs over depression

2010-11-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

Do you feel uncomfortable talking to a colleague about their mental wellbeing?

Why are we so fearful to ask someone if they are OK? Or to say that we notice that they seem a bit down and is there is something they'd like to talk to you about?

We don't hesitate if they have a sniffle, a limp or a black eye. But a concern about someone's mental state is often too hot to handle.

We usually tell ourselves that it is none of our business. Or "what if I open up a can of worms?"

Of course it's your amygdala talking, The Almond Effect, holding you back because it's feeling threatened about what a well meaning question might lead to.

Each year, undiagnosed depression in the workplace costs $4.3 billion in lost productivity and this excludes Workcover/insurance claims, part-time or casual employees, retrenchment, recruitment and training.

In addition to absenteeism, depression accounts for more than 12 million days of reduced productivity each year.

The World Health Organization expects Depression to be the second leading cause of disability after heart disease by 2020

But depression can be overcome. And you can play a part in that recovery by not being afraid to have the conversation.

This is all leading me to say warmest congratulations to Geoff Huegill who was awarded 2010 Sports Performer of the Year.

Geoff has experienced depression. He talks about it - a key strategy.

Another of his strategies to overcome depression was exercise - and his reward was to win the Gold Medal in the 100 metre butterfly at the Commonwealth Games and another in the 4 by 100m relay!

Geoff is an Ambassador for the Black Dog Institute, the same organisation for which I am a volunteer Community Education Presenter on Depression and Bipolar Disorder.

He also has a great smile (and abs!)

Don't let The Almond Effect stop you lending an ear to the 1 in 5 Australians who suffer, sometimes in a very lonely way, from this very common challenge. The person you talk to may not win a Commonwealth Gold Medal but be assured that they would want to give you one.

Why Don't you quit your job?

2010-11-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

Well, why don't you??

Sorry – only joking!
But seriously, how many of you want to quit your job and get another but are procrastinating for some reason?

“It’s not the right time, I’ve just come back from leave, they were really understanding when my mother died, they were generous when we had our baby, I don’t want to let my team down, I’d feel like a rat leaving a sinking ship. What would I do? What else can I do? I’m too old or not old enough, haven’t got enough experience, am overqualified, they paid for my Masters, my boss would bad mouth me etc. I will do it soon.”

Any of those phrases resonate with you? Any of them come from you?

Why are you holding back?

The problem with suffering this dilemma is that you are probably unhappy, getting grumpy with your family, are dissatisfied with what you are achieving, hate going to work, feeling stressed and tense and not performing in your job to the best of your ability.

In the worst case scenarios, you could end up alienating the people at work who you want to ask to give you a reference or even precipitate some performance management counselling. At the least you are increasing your chances of a stress induced illness.

What’s holding you back?

It’s probably The Almond Effect® - your inbuilt human survival system is mistaking the thought of changing jobs for an ambush of sabre-tooth tigers and showing up as avoidance, delay, excuses – in other words, you’re resisting change and finding plenty of valid reasons to do so. Is that you?

Have you changed jobs before?

If you’ve moved on to other roles in the past, please think about how that worked out.

You might have been unlucky and it was not a good move. If that is the case, then the STAR suggestions are definitely for you.

If you have successfully changed jobs in the past, then in addition to STAR, think about what is the same about your current situation and what is different?

What was good about the previous move? What wasn’t? What were you afraid of then, if anything, and how is that different to this time? What can you build on out of that past experience?

Use the STAR approach to sort this out

Stop: You have to find a circuit breaker to stop the worry words from dominating your thought process.

Curiously the best way to do this is to focus on the feelings you have and put a name to what you actually are experiencing.

I have created two Wordles to help you choose the words: one is of positive emotion words and the other of negative ones.

Naming your emotion calms down your amygdala and engages your pre-frontal cortex.

Then you can...

Think: Once you’ve put your ‘almonds’ on hold, now think carefully about why you are feeling the way you are.

What evidence is there to say that the feeling is justified? If there is evidence, how much have you developed personally since the last time?

Considerably I am sure and now you are much better able to manage the situation and any negative impacts that you went through last time you changed jobs.

You stand a better chance of managing your emotions if you ...

Act: Take some steps. Set aside time to update your resume. Let me know if you would like the name of someone who can help you with this.

Next, cut out or print some job ads that could interest you. Study them and highlight the parts of the job that really interest you, that you can already do and the parts that would challenge you. Make sure there are plenty of the latter.

Then start applying.

Rewire: Every time you have either an interview that doesn’t go so well or a ‘not at this time’ note, review what you are doing well and what you can do differently.

If you take the time to do this and focus on thinking about and repeating the actions that are working for you, you’ll strengthen those new synaptic connections which will make the whole change job process easier each time.

You can’t erase the fear yet

Neuroscientists are getting closer every day to understanding how our amygdalae work and how it will be possible to eradicate bad memories.

When they can do that, we’ll have the ethical question about whether we can have some neuro-cosmetic intervention to allow us to selectively inhibit our responses to certain stimuli.

Until then, if you are unhappy in your job or simply need to move on for more experience, more money and/or a fresh challenge, don’t let The Almond Effect® stop you.

It evolved for us to stave off real predators not the ones you imagine will jump out at you when you hand in your notice.

Don't do your Inbox

2010-10-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

What do you do first when you get to work? Do you go straight to your email or do you start on the toughest project that you have to do?

Most of us open the Inbox.

And there’s a good reason why.

Other than the size of it, usually an Inbox is low threat. It needs nowhere near as much brain energy as the big project and we get an instant sense of satisfaction as we delete, delete, delete and clear lots of messages.

And if you ever near the bottom of your inbox – wow, now that’s a buzz.

Your amygdala prefers the Inbox

But why do we do things in that order? You guessed it; it’s The Almond Effect®. We put off the demanding projects because there is much more riding on it than clearing the Inbox.

The project is demanding - we have to focus, concentrate, solve problems and create solutions. And that’s stressful.

In other words, your amygdala senses the project as a threat (The Almond Effect®) so to avoid the threat, you do the non-threatening things first i.e. your Inbox.

Brain drain

The problem with that approach is that even though you are taking the relatively unstressful course of doing your email, you are using up brain energy leaving you less fresh to handle the project when you’ve got no other reason to procrastinate.

Now our brains only have so much capacity before the glucose runs low and our ability to think clearly and innovatively is compromised. Then we have to take a rest and eat or drink sugar.

And our brains will naturally channel our activities to save brain energy where possible – not only is it hard work to use the working memory in our brain but we might need the energy for later when the sabre-tooth tiger appears in our office or home :)

The same thing happens when we need to change – ourselves or others. We put it off because our amygdala senses a threat i.e. it's The Almond Effect®. Unless we think about it and alter the course of action, our brain will guide us to less challenging things first. And before you know it, the day’s simply disappeared and it’s time to go home!

How was your day?

So think about your day. What did you do first when you were fresh, alert and your brain was full of glucose and ready to go? Did you do the tough stuff or did your amygdala take over and guide you to an easy task first to defer the threat?

Try this

Here are some suggestions that might help you do the hard things first – and it’s all about being mindful about what you do and think:

1. Monitor your usual patterns of behaviour to find out (or simply confirm) when you tackle the more mentally demanding work. Do you do it at your freshest or does your amygdala sabotage you in some way?

2. Be very clear about your short and long term goals – make sure the way you do your work is congruent with your objectives

3. Don’t impose the need to be perfect on yourself

4. Watch what you’re saying to yourself mentally e.g. it’s really hard; I need a clear run; I’ll just stuff it up if I start now; I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow; it won’t be any good; I’m just not ready to do it; etc. etc

5. Don’t let your sensitivities and fears hold you back from doing something

6. Break the hard task down into small steps e.g. just do 150 words on it; or cover off on item 1 of the project

7. Give yourself congratulations for the small steps as well as the big ones.

Almonds all around us

The Almond Effect® catches us out in so many ways. It’s not just the big things eg: the fear of restructure, the presentation you have to give or the boss wanting to see you. It’s not just your daughter not coming home when she said she would. There are myriads of everyday occurrences when our amygdalae cause us to do something that is simply not the best course of action if you were to think about it.

So next time you go to your Inbox, just ask yourself if it’s the best time to be doing it? Or are you are putting off doing something that would benefit from the energy you are using up on reading chain mail, the ‘cc’s and pressing the delete button?

If you answered yes to the second question, you know what to do next!

Sit still for a minute!

2010-09-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

My life as a comma

I find it hard to sit still. My mind is always buzzing. The moment I sit down I usually jump up again because I think of things I’ve forgotten to do, can’t forget to do or have to do at that moment. When I do sit down, my husband says it’s just a comma in my life!

In fact, unless I am on holiday I feel really uncomfortable, even guilty, just sitting down to read a magazine or novel. And watch a movie or TV during the day? It would be simpler, emotionally, to fly to the moon.

Can you relate to that? What is it that drives this behaviour? And what implications does it have, not only for rest and recharging but also for creative thinking time.

And how does this spill over into our lives at work? How can we be energized and efficient, reflective and strategic if we don’t sit still long enough to let thoughts percolate? How can we build trusting relationships with the team around us if we don’t stay still long enough to be emotionally engaged in the relationship?

The boss who never stops

I thought about Peter. He was a man I worked with many years ago. Peter arrived in the office at 7.30am and was usually the last to leave. He was always on the go – visible, active, always busy but he didn’t get the results that we anticipated. And his relations with his team were poor.

That made me think about a CEO I worked with for a number of years. Let’s call him Simon. Simon was another of those people always on the move. Yet i spent most of that time trying to get him to stay out of the operational areas and focus on being ‘emotionally’ available to his executive team. The challenge was that his comfort zone was in the operational area where he had excelled and charted his very successful career.

Our boss didn’t know us

To put it bluntly, he was shy and uncomfortable talking to people who weren’t his buddies. And it showed. His staff meetings and presentations made us all see and feel his discomfort. He shared plenty of facts and figures, strategy, plans for the future and intelligence about what the competition was up to.

But he never engaged us on a personal level. We didn’t know anything about Simon. And we certainly didn’t believe he knew anything about us.

As a result, people switched off, felt uninspired and did not feel they could raise questions that were on their minds. Simon lacked personal credibility as a leader even though he was a smart and likeable man and a great engineer. Inevitably the good people took their ambitions, ideas and innovative ‘what if’s’ elsewhere and the organization lost serious intellectual capital.

If only Simon had taken the time to get to know people personally, share stories, paid attention to their individual needs, goals and aspirations, helped them overcome their concerns and encouraged and rewarded their enthusiasm. And as a leader, that was his job.

Guilt in the home

I also thought about two women I am close to – a friend and a family member. One works extraordinarily long hours (over 13 hours a day) in a very senior role, then spends almost all of her non-working time looking after her young daughter. Yet she feels guilty if she reads a magazine for 5 minutes or takes time to exercise.

The other woman has just had an operation to remove a cancerous growth. 48 hours after the operation, she is feeling guilty because her pain and exhaustion mean she has to sit still.

Too much activity can sabotage us

As a leader and change catalyst, engendering trust, building relationships, listening to others and garnering emotional commitment are mission critical skills. How else can we get our people on board with cost cutting, streamlining processes, with changing or eliminating practices and behaviours they know and are comfortable with? How else can we excite their curiosity and passion about a new version of the future and what it might mean for them?

Three fundamental of successful change

ChangeTrack Research (CT0508] has identified three fundamentals of successful change:

* Change must make a positive difference to the bottom line
* Trust in leaders. If it evaporates, change falls over
* There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’

So while Simon and Peter were setting out to achieve the first, their inability or unwillingness to be ‘still’, to be in relationship with their people long enough to work on the other two fundamentals, meant that neither they, nor the companies, achieved their full potential.

What drives this behaviour?

Perhaps it’s a gene and generational thing. I recall my mother, who never sat still herself, made sure that we were always doing something. Sitting and reading was only permissible if it was homework and all the housework was done (almost an impossibility). That’s my recollection yet it’s probably faulty because we now know that each time we recall a memory, we refashion it into the new context. That’s both the ‘beauty and the beast’ of neuro-plasticity.

But unless and until we examine our behaviour drivers, we simply keep doing them and they become ingrained, habitual and hard to change. Even though I know that the implications I draw from my memory may not be accurate, the ‘guilt’ attached to sitting still feels real.

Visibility at work

And at work, what do we value? What have we habitually valued over the years? Even though organisations now talk about focus on outcomes and results, how many managers do you know, still feel uncomfortable if someone is not in the workplace, is working from home, seems to be spending a lot of time talking to others or conversely doesn’t seem to be doing very much at all? Why aren’t they DOING something!

The Almond Effect®

Of course I suspect our Amygdala is also involved in this. So I ask what are we anxious (fearful) about that conjures this need to be constantly on the move and suspect others who aren’t.
As we have discussed many times, The Almond Effect® is when our amygdala triggers reactions to perceived threats that are simply psychological not physical. It doesn’t make it any less real of course.

And thoughts are just that. They are simply constructs in our brains. We can change those thoughts and the feelings and behaviours that go with them. We can apply STAR to these behaviours:

* Stop and catch yourself moving, moving, moving whether it be in your mind or your body
* Think about what’s driving your behaviour and what would be the consequences if you were ‘still’ and reflective for a period
* Act differently – set goals for how long you will be 'still' and 'present' for others
* Rewire – ask yourself if anything disastrous happened when you did reach your goal and stayed ‘still’ whether in mind or body. When you realize it didn’t, rewire that insight and reflection into your memory.

My goal

So I have just been still for the last couple of hours writing this CLUES. Admittedly I am on a plane so that may have an influence! But I am practicing what I preach and am re-training myself to be still both in my mind and body, in the office and at home.

Practicing Mindfulness is one part of that strategy and we will come back to Mindfulness, its role in focusing attention and controlling stress and anxiety (The Almond Effect®) in another CLUES. In the meantime the goal I’m aiming for? That my husband tells me I’ve progressed from a comma to a semi-colon and ultimately to a page break!

Do you trust your memory? Perhaps you shouldn't

2010-08-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with some friends over a lovely Sunday BBQ lunch a couple of weekends back. It was a gorgeous Sydney day – warm, not too hot or humid, the bluest sky you ever saw and only a gentle breeze rustling of the leaves on the gum trees around us.

One of my friends started to tell us all about seeing a couple having an argument in a restaurant. As the story unfolded, his wife who had been in the restaurant with him, started to ‘correct’ him, saying things like: ‘no, she was the one who thumped the table, not him’ and ‘no, you’ve got it wrong, he stormed out first, not her’.

Sadly our friends then started to argue between themselves about who had the correct recollection. Initially they each adamantly believed that they had the right version. Eventually the husband changed his mind and agreed that his wife’s version was correct and that his initial thoughts were wrong.

Now some of you are thinking – of course he’d give in to his wife!

This might be a serious problem

But is this a familiar scenario? i.e. people witness the same event or discussion but their recall and memories of it differ.

Perhaps you’ve even doubted your own memory of what you saw or heard. Yet after talking to other witnesses, you may have changed your mind about what you saw or heard and genuinely agree with and adopt the other version as your own.

That what happened in 1995 during the investigation of the Oklahoma Bombing. You may recall that one witness Tom Kessinger initially said that Timothy McVeigh had an accomplice. Other ‘witnesses’ who had talked with Kessinger and others agreed and this sparked a huge hunt and expenditure in time and resources for the non-existent John Doe No.2.

Kessinger later testified that he was mistaken. There was no accomplice.

Dr Helen Paterson from the University of Sydney is exploring the ramifications of memory recall in the context of contaminated witness testimony in court cases.

You can listen to her talk about her research here. It goes to the heart of witness reliability and may have very serious implications for veracity of evidence from witnesses in trials especially criminal matters where innocence or guilt is determined.

Memories are not fixed

Memories are retrieved usually with the help of some cues – that’s where the problems of The Almond Effect® come in!
And the old thinking was that memories were stable and permanent. All that happened was that they faded with time.

But research has shown that memories are much more malleable and impressionable than that.
So the challenge is that we may not even be recalling accurate memories. Our memories may have become contaminated. For example by taking on other people’s versions of events?

Why can this happen? Well we now know that memories are simply reconstructions. And as such they can be adjusted, changed, tampered with.

False Memories

At one end of the spectrum there is the psychological condition known as False Memory Syndrome. This is where someone has a memory which is a distortion of an actual experience, or a confabulation of an imagined one. Many false memories involve confusing or mixing fragments of memory events, some of which may have happened at different times but which are remembered as occurring together.

However in our day to day lives, we experience this shifting in our memories as simply not quite an accurate reconstruction. For example, we can forget things, include things, ‘remember’ the event as being bigger, smaller, more dramatic, less dramatic, and declare that the fish was over a metre long!

And neuroscientists also tell us that our recall can grow or diminish under the influence of other people’s remembrances.

So what?

We have talked before about the role of ‘history’ in leading change. If you are implementing any kind of change in your organisation, then the way that employees ‘remember’ how change was implemented in the past, its implications and ramifications usually has a major impact on the mindset and willingness of your employees to adopt your proposed changes now.

So you need to pay attention to what has happened during previous organisational change.

And you need to ensure that the recall of the events is accurate.

As Paterson said: "When people remember an event together their memories become more similar to each others' than if they had not had this discussion.
"Through this process, known as memory conformity, a group of people can come to share a single, inaccurate memory for the event."

Evidence based change history

The best way to ensure accurate history is to look to the evidence, notes and records made contemporaneously. However many organisations simply do not keep records of the feelings and reactions of people during the change process. Plenty of project and technical data is recorded for posterity but rarely the qualitative journey.

Test the organisational and individual recollections

So if your organisation doesn’t have such records, you will be relying on people’s recall. This means you’ll need to carefully test and explore any negative memories to get to the reality.

However as you do so, remember that the negative feelings could be the result of The Almond Effect®. And even if the facts are wrong, the emotions evoked by a perceived accurate recollection of an event will be very real indeed.

At the very least ensure that records are kept of both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the people change management journey so that future change initiatives in your organisation have an accurate history to work from.

Clues Emotions spread like viruses

2010-07-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

‘I‘d like my life back’

When Tony Hayward, CEO of BP at the time of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill said these words, millions of people shuddered. It was a careless, stupid and thoughtless thing to say when the human, environmental and economic cost of the BP disaster is almost incalculable.

His apparent insensitivity was made emphasised by reports and footage taken of him sailing off the Isle of Wight shortly after.

I doubt anyone felt sorry for him though if you know about The Almond Effect®, you’ll know where that statement came from.

The Almond Effect® - Lack of judgment

His words and actions showed a complete lack of judgment. It was The Almond Effect® in full force. Tired, battered, desperate for a solution and an end to the disaster, Hayward wasn’t thinking. His emotional brain was talking.

This was a very public example of the need we all have to manage our amygdala and develop the skills to think before we speak or act.

Split second actions

Can you, like me, think of times when you wish you could go back in time and regain the opportunity to do or say something differently?

The email or SMS sent too quickly, the words that just tumbled out of your mouth, the inappropriate facial expression or body language, the action you regret – all happening in a split second, without thinking, just reacting – like Hayward.
Not stopping to think about the impact of what you say or do on others.

Do you use one-liners and throw-away lines?

One-liners and throw-away lines fall into the same category. The words are probably meant to be funny but instead make the target of the remarks and people around at the time cringe? It’s another example of our amygdala talking, it’s certainly not the thinking brain unless we rationally intend to do emotional harm.

Emotions spread like viruses

In addition to the stupidity of the words, there is another element to Hayward’s blunder that is almost as scary – and it impacts all of us who want to bring about change at work. It is the speed with which Hayward’s gaffe, and the negative emotions associated with it, spread around the globe.

We know that emotions are contagious. People catch emotions the way they catch a cold.

Now add the power of global media and social networking into the mix.

How long does it take a negative comment in your place to spread? How many of your people are on Facebook, twitter or simply SMS. In addition to the chatter, facial expressions and body language, all it takes is a phone.

Lessons for leaders

When you take on the role of leader, I believe you also take on the responsibility to watch every word that comes out of your mouth, especially when you’re tired, stressed, having a bad day, had an argument at home or simply that your coffee tastes awful.

Learn the skills to recognise your triggers and ANTs before your amygdala precipitates you into saying or doing something you regret or that negatively impacts changes you are trying to bring about in your organisation.

This skill that will not only make you a leader that people want to follow but it will significantly enhance your career.

CLUES Silence is Golden - or is it?

2010-06-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

What to do when people don’t speak up

Robert sat there with his arms folded. He dropped his head a little, widened his eyes and looked up at me with an expression that was hard to accurately read.

Was he still engaged with the discussion? I think so but was it positive or negative engagement?

I suspect the latter because my almond had already started smoking! My amygdala must have become aware of his body language and change of facial expression momentarily after we began talking about the way negative emotional responses infect the team around you.

I wondered what was going on for him. Was it The Almond Effect®? He had just received some challenging information from his personal profile. And a co-facilitator had given him similar feedback about the negative emotional impact his management style had on others. I suspect the current conversation was ‘hitting a nerve’ and resonating uncomfortably with him.

Do you notice someone going quiet?

He wasn’t happy – that much was clear. His silence, the subtle shift in body language and eyes told me that he was withdrawing from the conversation.

I’m not sure how many others noticed. Certainly no-one in the rest of the group said anything.

And it got me wondering. How many meetings or discussions do we attend where someone simply holds back, doesn’t do or say anything because they are in fight/flight/freeze mode?

We lose valuable input, ideas and challenges because, without effective self-management, we ourselves may experience The Almond Effect® when we see it in others.

Silent Saboteurs

We recognise The Almond Effect® when it shows up in explicit ways. For example, people become aggressive, walk out of meetings, go home sick, get together in the lunch room or via Facebook, send nastily toned emails, make mistakes or simply don’t show up.

Yet withdrawal can be just as damaging because we no longer have full engagement, participation and contribution. In fact we may mistake someone’s silence as implied agreement and consent to a course of action, when unknown to us, we have a silent saboteur in the room.

We are more likely to notice when an extrovert withdraws. But it can be harder to tell if an introverted thinker is simply thinking about the issue or has made a decision to withdraw their contribution.

How can we tell if the silence is golden or a problem?

How much time do you spend actively noticing emotional reactions in your interactions i.e. focussing beyond the content of what you want to say? We are all busy, we all need to get stuff done in a hurry. Looking for and responding to emotional cues requires focus and energy. So it’s not surprising that we might miss some of the more subtle signals.

Yet I know that I am not the only one who has regretted not picking up on something in a conversation. Have you ever been there? At the extreme, it could result in a horrendous outcome – someone harms themselves because they are clinically depressed and we either haven’t noticed or if we do, we think:’ I haven’t got time to deal with this now’ or: ‘it’s not my job to deal with this”.

The Black Dog Institute encourages us to take the time to ask “R U OK?” when we notice that someone might be in a dark emotional space.

How can we become better at interpreting silences?

One way is to learn to really focus on what is going on beyond the actual words. Mindfulness is a skill that helps us develop self-awareness and self-management skills which in turn helps us master the ability the read the emotions of others.

It works by teaching us to how to keep control of our own emotions, minimise distracting thoughts and concentrate of what is happening around us at that moment.

If you go here you will find a simple explanation of mindfulness and some techniques to develop it.

Ask the right questions

Another leadership skill in these situations is to ask questions, the right questions of the quiet ones. If their withdrawal is caused by The Almond Effect® then your purpose is to actively engage them in a thinking activity which may help to dampen down the amygdalic activity. This means asking questions that are open-ended and require an answer.

Here are some to give you a flavour of what I’m thinking about here:
* What roadblocks can you see with ............in your area?
* How will this be received in your team?
* Specifically, thinking about how it impacts you/your area, what are the items we must take into account?
* What would it take for this to gain traction in your area?
* If you were me, what would you do about......

Getting your kids to open up

It is not just at work that people withdraw. In a recent workshop discussing the language of emotions and feelings, one participant shared a fabulous strategy to open the door for more meaningful conversations with our children.

Single word answers like ‘good’, ‘OK’, are not allowed in response to questions like: ‘How was school?,’ ‘How are you feeling?’, ‘What do you think about that?’ What a smart parenting and leadership idea!

CLUES We'll change when the bosses do

2010-03-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

Do you find that your time is even harder to manage these days? I know I do.

A colleague of mine works for training company that offers time management solutions. I wrote about her several years ago and, even though she’s risen up the ranks, I can’t believe it but she still has the same problem – this time with her CEO.

My colleague’s company trains employees to manage their time more effectively and improve productivity and performance. It’s amazing how popular these courses are even though they’ve been around for decades.

So, can you imagine how my colleague felt when her boss, now the CEO, said he just didn't have time to meet with her to go through her performance review and career development plan! She felt like she was in a time warp!

Common reasons for failure

Our conversation set me thinking about why so many change efforts still stall or lose momentum. One of the most common reasons remains congruency or consistency (or lack of it) by the so called leaders.

For example, let's say you decide that to increase your competitiveness in a cut-throat market, your organization’s culture is holding you back.

Despite the kick in the guts, or even because of it, by the global financial crisis, the culture remains inward looking and process driven.

To survive, the company must become outward, customer focused across all its operations and not just at the customer interface.

The company embarks on the change process. It restructures; it retrains staff and starts on a culture change program.
Yet despite the clear reasons why the culture must change and past behaviours and responses examined, many members of senior management continue to resort to short term expediency of cutting costs rather spending time on a careful well conceived approach to obtain and deliver the necessary strategic outcomes. They haven’t learned to manage The Almond Effect® yet!

So the company starts a cost cutting exercise. Senior management even visits the front line to drive the cost-cutting message home.

What's the result?

Staff are confused by the mixed messages; they remain inward looking, there is still no focus on the customer. Nothing seems to have changed over a decade.

Leaders should set the pace

During times of change and pressure, people always look to their leaders to set the pace and show the way.

Psychologically we are designed to respond positively or at least neutrally, to consistency. When things don’t turn out the way we expect based on our brain’s hard-wired patterns, that’s when The Almond Effect® can happen.

Comedians play on this and make us laugh by delivering a line we can't predict. You can't see it coming. But in a comic situation, you know it’s safe and not a threat.

Inconsistency is acceptable in some situations but what most people want in the workplace is to know what's coming next and to be able to rely on their leaders. People believe what they see, not what is said. They want leaders they can trust.

I have never met an employee yet who says, "I love the way I don't know how the boss is going to react. It's great that it is never the same."

If you can remember back a few years, just consider your reaction and the reaction of the American people to the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky debacle. It’s still talked about.

Most people did not care too much about the fact that the then President had an affair. What started to shift opinions were his inconsistent statements. That inconsistency, not the affair, almost cost him the Presidency and most certainly impacted on the level of trust in him by the American people.

Beware the silent saboteur

If leaders "don't practice what they preach" or "walk their talk", their people don't trust them. When that happens, people become cynical, unresponsive to change and at worst become 'silent saboteurs'.

We know there is a problem and the change isn't going according to plan but we just can't seem to put our finger on it.

A major challenge for leaders of change is they must have the resilience, tenacity and clarity of vision to shake off the old and focus on the new. In complex and difficult change situations, it's easy to fall back into the old ways of doing things when the going gets tough.

What can management do?

So what does a CEO and the management team need to do to change the culture and bring about any changes in attitude or behaviours to a new way of doing business?

Try this list for starters:

Get out there and communicate:

* The business reasons for change – why change is necessary. This is one of the top reasons why people don’t get on board – they have no convincing answer to the question: Why should I change

* Create urgency- show the extreme pressure to change coming from outside the organization

* Validate the way the organization has been to date and their role in it

* Describe the new vision and scope – what will it be like after change – define it from perspective of the listener

* Identify what is not changing

* Explain the change process - the initiatives and timelines

* Let them know what changes can be expected and when

* Describe the problems they might experience

* Explain the impact of not changing

* Don’t blame the past or people

* Answer the WIFM question and “How will this affect me? ‘What am I expected to do?’

And ensure that all your influencers at whatever level act consistently and congruently with all the change messages that are being sent. If they do not, move them out of your company or to a position of no influence, direct or indirect.

Can you step up?

This is a big job, not for the feint hearted. But for leaders who realise that this is the most important role of the leader, your reward will be to join the small and exclusive list of leaders who have successfully taken their organizations to the next level.

CLUES Is lack of sleep making you a poor leader?

2010-02-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

Are you getting enough?

Ever considered that the amount of sleep you get is a key factor in staff retention?

Researchers tell us that sleep is critical for our children’s capacity to learn. If they don’t get enough sleep, their ability to make new connections and their ability to concentrate is impaired.

Typical daily sleep requirements for children by age are:

• Infants (3 to 11 months): 14-15 hours
• Toddlers: 12-14 hours
• Preschoolers: 11-13 hours
• School-age children: 10-11 hours

So, are your kids getting enough sleep?

And as importantly, are you?

Why does it matter?

High performing brains, especially the pre-frontal cortex areas (PFC), require heaps of energy in the form of glucose. The PFC is responsible for our executive functioning like planning, decision-making, analysis, comparisons and behaviour control i.e. complex cognitive activities.

Just like children, if we are haven’t had enough sleep then our bodies prioritise the available energy just to keep us physically functioning. That means our brains, especially the PFC, lag behind in the race for glucose.

Result: tired brains find it hard to come up with new answers. One consequence is that we end up repeating what we have done before even if we know we should find a new way. We find it hard to focus, we procrastinate or we hastily make decisions that we should sleep on!

Negative memories and bad decisions prevail

Add this piece of research into the mix: Dan Ariely at Duke University wondered if decisions made in negative emotional circumstances in the past influenced future actions when the original emotion was no longer present. He did some experiments and concluded that they did.

Reason: when we make decisions, we tap into the memories of decisions we made in the past in circumstances that can be linked in some way to the present situation. That’s easier for our brain than having to come up with new neural connections (a new decision).

Now, negative memories (and their associated decisions) will always come to mind first because our amygdala is always on guard to protect us. They will, as Ariely puts it ‘become part of the blueprint’ for future actions.

And it’s when we use this blueprint and respond inappropriately, that’s what I call The Almond Effect®.

If we are tired our PFC is too exhausted to reflect back on the emotional circumstances in which the original decision was made and consider whether the decision is still the correct one in the fresh situation.

We are then likely to make the same poor decision again even though we may not be feeling the same negative emotions we felt when the original decision was made!

I wonder if that’s why office feuds, silo battles, home arguments, even wars, go on for so long – long after the original cause has been defused. We just haven’t stopped to challenge the pattern in our brain and so keep repeating decisions and behaviours because ‘that’s the way it’s always been.’

Ask your people if they like working for you when you are sleep deprived

So, for most of us lack of sleep means snap decisions, procrastination, repeating bad decisions, inability to concentrate and bad moods. And because we are tired we eat the junk food our bodies crave for an instant sugar (glucose) hit. We are too weary to do any exercise and so the exhaustion cycle continues – just adding to the load on our bodies and the depletion of energy.

Do your people love working for you when you are like that? Are you a good leader? Do they feel ‘engaged’?

They might put up with it for a few days, a few weeks, even longer but in the end, they’ll walk away and find someone who is easier to work with.

What to do about it

I’m not your mother so I’m not going to tell you to go to bed earlier, take a break, get some exercise, eat proper food, cut down on the alcohol – you can work that out yourself.

But at the very least, acknowledge when lack of sleep is impacting the way you lead. Consider whether, if you were in your people’s shoes, you are providing the kind of leadership that will encourage your best employees to stay?

If the answer is no and lack of sleep has something to do with it, then maybe you should let your kids put you to bed, read you a bedtime story and kiss you goodnight!

CLUES Will your stress cost you your job?

2010-01-28T00:31:00.000-08:00

Are you a good stress manager? You need to be to keep your people engaged

You may be one of those lucky people who never feel stressed. If that’s you, that’s fabulous – although you might want to check with your family and the people who work for you to see if they agree based on what they see.

Stress is a natural and normal part of our lives. But if your heart constantly races, your shoulders are always tight, your tummy is a tangle of knots, you haven’t slept properly for ages, you continually feel sick, on edge, weepy, angry etc, then your amygdala is triggering physical warning signs that you need to take notice of.

It’s The Almond Effect®, the inappropriate activation of our survival response. This fight or flight reaction is designed to help us in life threatening and dangerous situations. At those times, our amygdala triggers the release of chemicals and hormones to heighten our awareness and give us a jolt of power and strength to protect ourselves from the threat. It’s a short-term solution to a short-term threat.

However if we don’t manage longer term stress that comes from work or home situations, our bodies stay in a stressed or alert state for much longer periods of time than is safe for us to cope with. We end up exacerbating the situation and doing even more harm to ourselves.

Not only your health but your job may be at risk

Symptoms of stress are like a smoke alarm going off. We need to do something about it, immediately. If we delay and allow stress to turn into distress, not only will we experience a negative impact on our health and personal relationships but it may prove to be a career limiting move - especially if you have aspirations to move up the corporate ladder.

Your stress impacts engagement

Why? Failure to deal with your own stress could seriously influence how people feel about working with you and for you.

One of the key elements in retaining good people and keeping them engaged is your ability to manage your stress so that it doesn’t affect the people around you.

Who wants to go to work not knowing whether the boss will be ‘up’ or ‘down’, approachable or not, communicative or sullen, energetic or lethargic, short-tempered or easy-going, acknowledging good work or not even noticing, empathetic or distant, clear in what they want (or don’t want) or has fuzzy thinking?

A statement of the obvious? Of course! Yet some people-managers think that stress is a weakness and deny its existence even when it is demonstrably clear to everyone around them that they are stressed out.

They often try to suppress or ignore the signals usually with very sad longer-term health consequences. In another issue of CLUES I’ll tell you more about the impact of suppressing emotions on our bodies.

You damage yourself, your people and your organisation

Even employees with the highest level of self-awareness and management are worn down dealing with the actual or potential ramifications of your stress. And as the economy strengthens and regains traction, retaining our best employees and keeping all our people engaged will continue to be a major issue.

So what to do about it

These are the fantastic tips from Kay Wilhelm on the Black Dog Institute website.

1. Work out priorities
Keep a list - make the tasks possible. Prioritise the tasks in order of importance and tick off when done. Include the important people in your life as priorities and attend to these relationships.

2. Identify your stress situations
Make a list of events that leave you emotionally drained, with one or two ways to reduce the stress for each. When they occur, use them as an opportunity to practise your stress reduction techniques, then, keep notes on what works for next time.

3. Learn to ‘reframe’ statements: Don't react to imagined insults
It is a waste of time and energy to be oversensitive to imagined insults, innuendo or sarcasm. Give people the benefit of the doubt; talk over the situation with someone you trust. They may have another spin on what was said.

4. Think before you commit yourself to other people's expectations
We can often perform tasks merely to feel accepted by other people. Practice saying "no" to requests that are unreasonable or more than you can handle at the time - rather than suffer subsequent regrets and stress. Consider whether you should learn to rely less on the approval of others, again, talk this over with someone you trust.

5. Move on: Don't dwell on past mistakes
Feelings of guilt, remorse and regret cannot change the past and they make the present difficult by sapping your energy. Make a conscious effort to do something to change the mood (eg mindfulness technique or something active you enjoy) when you feel yourself drifting into regrets about past actions. Learn from it and have strategies in place for next time. Learn to forgive yourself for past mistakes.

6. Learn to defuse anger and frustrations rather than bottle them up
Express and discuss your feelings to the person responsible for your agitation. If it is impossible to talk it out, plan for some physical activity at the end of the working day to relieve tensions. Let go of grudges –they do not affect the potential victim because he does not necessarily know about them. However, the grudge-bearer pays a price in energy and anxiety just thinking about revenge.

7. Set aside time each day for recreation and exercise
Gentle repetitive exercise such as walking, swimming, cycling are good to relieve stress. Meditation, yoga, Pilates and dance are also excellent. The trick is to find what suits you best. Hobbies that focus attention are also good stress relievers. Take up a new activity unrelated to your current occupation, one that gives you a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Establish new friends in your newly found interest. There are handouts with a range of techniques for relaxation and mindfulness on the Black Dog Institute website that you can use.

8. Take your time: don't let people rush you
Frenzied activities lead to errors, regrets, stress. Request time to orient yourself to the situation. At work, if rushed, ask people to wait until you finish working or thinking something out. Plan ahead to arrive at appointments early, composed and having made allowances for unexpected hold-ups. Practice approaching situations ‘mindfully’.

9. Take your time on the road: Don't be an aggressive car driver
Develop an "I will not be ruffled" attitude. Drive defensively and give way to bullies. Near misses cause stress and strain, so does the fear of being caught for speeding. If possible avoid peak hour traffic. If caught in it, relax by concentrating on deep (stomach) breathing or ‘mindful driving’ (using mindfulness technique, also available on website). Advanced driving lessons can be useful.

10. Help children and young people to cope with stress
Children need the experience of being confronted with problems to try out, and improve their ability to cope. By being overprotective or by intervening too soon, parents may prevent young people from developing valuable tolerance levels for problems, or from acquiring problem-solving skills.

11. Think positively – you get what you expect
Smile whenever possible –it’s an inexpensive way of improving your looks and how you feel. Try and find something positive to say about a situation, particularly if you are going to find fault. You can visualise situations you have handled well and hold those memories in your mind when going into stressful situations.

12. Cut down on drinking, smoking, sedatives and stimulants
They only offer temporary relief and don’t solve the problem. They can create more problems in terms of physical and mental health. Consider the effects you are looking for (sedation or stimulation) and how else you can achieve them

It’s your life and job on the line

Your ability to manage stress is not just an issue for you and your family. It is critical to effective leadership. Your impact on staff will lead to good people staying or going and whether they perform at their optimal levels.

I strongly believe that great leadership starts with crystal clear awareness about ourselves, our emotions, our responses and our ability to manage ourselves for optimal health and performance.

Isn’t it fantastic that mastering stress and mental well-being is not only essential for yourself but will have a hugely positive effect on the people around you and their performance? And that can only be a good thing for your career.

P.S.
I’d love to know if you found this CLUES useful and any other topics you’d like to read about.

CLUES Don't fight with your family this Christmas!

2009-12-16T03:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas with the family – pleasure or a pain?

As Christmas approaches, many of us will be preparing for the annual family get together.

Some of you will be looking forward to it.

A few of you will be putting on the family event or attending it because it’s the tradition in your family but dreading how it might turn out.

Others will have, as I used to, inflated expectations of what a lovely, friendly, happy event it would be – only to be disappointed. You can’t make a family that doesn’t have lovely, friendly, happy relationships through the year, have them on Christmas Day!

Take a STAR approach to the Festive Season

Whichever category you fall into, don’t let your ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts) get in the way.

Be aware if you feel yourself getting agitated or annoyed (i.e. The Almond Effect®). Notice it and tell yourself to calm down. It is only for this day. Don’t let the stress and tension cause you to miss the potential pleasure of having a hassle free Christmas.

Be a STAR. Stop and Think about what’s going on before you Act. Then when you reflect on the day, don’t let your brain strengthen any negative hard-wiring. Focus on the good things that happened and Rewire those.

And watch out for everyone else’s Almonds (amygdalae) too! Don’t rise to the bait.

Sugar coat the 'almonds' on this occasion – after all, it will be 365 days until the next one!

Hope you have a fabulous Festive Season and a wonderful 2010

CLUES Don't keep them in the dark

2009-11-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

“Don’t share this with anybody”.

Has your boss ever said that to you? Have you ever said it to your team?

The secret might be about a restructure, change in product line, new technology, the company’s financial results, a mistake, a failure, a possible merger, something about themselves, another employee or even about your role yet you are sworn to silence.

And what about at home? Have you ever withheld something from your partner or kids? An action that’s left you feeling uncomfortable at best and dishonest at worst?

Apart from the discomfort you almost certainly experience, I am sure you’ve witnessed the effect of secrecy on people around you especially if they suspect something is up and they are already operating in an information vacuum.

People generally hate being kept in the dark. You are right if you suspect that our amygdalae are implicated in reactions to silence in ‘suspicious’ circumstances.

You are so predictable!

Let’s explore this. Most of what we do everyday we don’t need to think about - we run on ‘automatic.’ We consciously don’t need to think about what to do next – we just ‘know’. Our brain guides us to take action based on pre-existing patterns of behaviour (habits) and predictability of outcomes.

So from the moment you get out of bed to the time you go back to bed, you probably follow a comparable routine each day. We don’t like to think we are predictable but we are. We have to be otherwise our working memory would be exhausted and we would be bushed from the sheer effort of using our brains so much.

Routines are the basis of how we live

For me, my early morning outline is to get out of bed, go to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, turn on the electric jug, get my vitamins out, turn on my computer, open the sliding doors to the deck, open the front door and go down the steps to collect the newspaper, get my breakfast and so on. I don’t actively think about it - it just happens like that most mornings.

My sub-conscious brain is guiding my actions and making decisions (like, is there enough water in the jug, stop pouring milk into the bowl) based on neural patterns laid down in its hardwiring that predict outcomes

Of course, if the paper hasn’t been delivered or I’ve run out of vitamins then the routine is interrupted. Then I have to stop and think about what to do – well actually first my amygdala automatically does some checking and assesses the risk to my survival with this break in pattern.

Usually it’s no big deal because my amygdala knows based on history that the lack of vitamins or a newspaper is not life threatening!

Pattern interrupter

However if my computer tells me when I turn it on that my hard drive has failed then that’s another reaction entirely - my ‘almonds’ kick in!

I immediately have to manage my survival response (manifesting as words that it’s preferable not to use!) and stop panicking long enough to get my thinking brain (pre-frontal cortex PFC) to work out where I put the number and service code for Dell, what I backed up, what I lost and what my priorities are.

My predictable morning didn’t go as planned so The Almond Effect® kicked in – and I haven’t even been up longer than 10 minutes!

Is it the same at work?

What do you do when you get to work, do you follow the same routine? For example, it could be that you turn on the computer, get coffee, say hi to people at the workstation across from you, open your email, look at your diary etc.

No drama, all normal just as your brain predicted, unless an unexpected alert starts flashing on your screen to call your manager urgently. Your brain’s hard-wired pattern-based operation is stopped in its tracks as it rapidly tries to assess the ‘threat’ and predict what the urgency is all about.

Your amygdala is immediately on red alert asking whether the interruption is a threat to your survival. If history shows that an alert saying to call the boss immediately is likely to cause a problem, then The Almond Effect® kicks in.

I hope that because you have been in one of my workshops, you’ll immediately put STAR into operation and get your PFC engaged to think before you act!

Not knowing is worst for the brain than knowing

Uncertainty really throws our brains into a muddle because in the absence of any pattern to the contrary, our brain defaults to predict the worst outcome as its natural survival mechanism (The Almond Effect®) – even in non-life threatening situations at home or at work.

This is why you should never be surprised that withholding information, keeping secrets etc will lead to gossip (flocking) pessimism and worst case scenario interpretations.

Lack of certainty creates anxiety, frustration, gossip and innuendo – all expressions of The Almond Effect®.

And anxious people don’t concentrate or perform well –their brains are distracted - focussing on the cause of the anxiety. They are searching for any kind of predictable outcome so that the brain can operate with certainty again.

The situation is clearly exacerbated if we are already operating in an information vacuum because our brains will predict the worst case scenario so we can prepare ourselves to survive.

Applied at home, it means for example that if your teenager isn’t at the place they said they were going to, your almonds go off. If you unexpectedly find a hotel receipt in your spouse’s pocket, if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere – you get the picture!

Implications

Whether you are implementing changes at work or trying to hide something from someone at home, be aware that if the other party’s amygdala can’t see a ‘safe’ pattern, it will get suspicious. And the natural default reaction will be to focus on the worst case interpretation of the events with all the ramifications that will flow.

That’s why most people say, just tell us what’s going on – and then we can work out how to deal with it.

If you think you are doing people a favour by only giving information on a ‘need to know’ basis, think again – brain biology wants just the opposite.

CLUES Anxiety and poor decision making

2009-10-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Does anxiety ever cloud your ability to think clearly and make the best decision?

A couple of days ago, driving home from swimming training, I began to hear a ‘click-click-clicking’ sound. It seemed to be coming from the front of my car.

In a nano-second, I was on red alert and in the grip of The Almond Effect®.

My mind was racing: ‘I can’t have a flat tyre here – I’m in the middle of 3 lanes of traffic. I can’t get out of the car to check if I have a puncture because I’ll get run over. Oh no, I’m going to cause a traffic jam and then they’ll report it for everyone to hear on the radio. I can’t pull over but if I keep driving, I’ll be driving on the rim and that will be dangerous – and expensive!’

I became aware of my heartbeat speeding up and vivid memories of being stuck in the spiral loop of a multi-level carpark flooding back – which is what happened the last time I had a puncture, several years ago.

Crazy thoughts

On and on my amygdala worried:

“I can’t ring my husband because he is inter-state and can’t help. It’s already late and I have an early morning teleconference tomorrow that I still have to read the papers for. And if I don’t get home til late and am too tired to read the papers properly then I won’t be fully prepared for the meeting and that will be embarrassing and I’ll let my colleagues down. And I look a mess; my hair is still wet from swimming, my make-up is half-on and half-off. What an idiot not to have cleaned off all my make-up before I got into the pool.”

All these thoughts in just one or two seconds because my ears picked up a ‘click-click-clicking’ sound that I didn’t even know for certain was coming from my car!

Name the emotions

As soon as I noticed my heart starting to race I applied my STAR approach: Stop-Think-Act-Rewire.

I took a deep breath, and said to myself: “I am feeling anxious, frustrated and embarrassed.”

You’ll recall that neuroscientists say that doing this calms down our amygdala and this creates space for our pre-frontal cortex, our thinking brain, to work.

If you think of our amygdala as a smoke alarm, when we recognise and acknowledge the emotion we’re experiencing, we turn off and reset this ‘danger radar’. It’s like saying: “Got it - thanks for the warning – I’ll look into the problem now and find a solution.”

My rescuer was also experiencing The Almond Effect®

I took the chance – and kept driving as home was only a few kilometres away. I was extremely fortunate that I made it safely. The next morning, the Roadside Assistance patrol man arrived! He found a roofing nail lodged in the tread of the front tyre.

While he was changing the tyre for me, I mentioned that I had read that his organisation had posted a significant financial loss for the year. The press reported that services and jobs like his were at risk.

In an instant, I saw him in the grip of The Almond Effect®. My helpful rescuer told me what he and his co-workers were thinking. He said they had found out about the financial losses through the press and a voicemail after the announcement had been made.

He said that the drivers figure that crunch time for jobs and services will be in about 18 months time when the EBA comes up for renewal.

And as they, the drivers, thought about it some more, they believed this was all going to be about the EBA due for renewal in some 18 months time.

The driver continued to tell me all the things that he and his mates had worked out: how much the salary bill was for the patrol drivers, what the membership income was, how much the organisation had spent on a failed business venture, how many jobs will be lost, that the organisation really just wanted to bring in contractors, and so on. He also talked about the CEO and his failures (so they perceived) in other companies and how they believed that he was taking this organisation down the same path.

I’m sure much of it their number-crunching came from ‘back of the beer-mat’ calculations that may or may not be correct but their fears and disillusionment with the organisation were very real.

Communication vacuums breed fear

I don’t know what information the organisation has shared with its employees nor if anything that the driver told me is true. But what I do know from this conversation is that this driver’s ‘almonds’ (amygdalae) and those of his mates were aroused and on high alert as a result of the stories in the newspapers.

As a consequence, they were automatically in fight/flight mode, thinking of the worst possible outcomes and preparing to defend themselves from the ‘threat.’

I have seen this situation in many of the organisations that I have worked with. What results is that employees start focussing so much on the perceived threat that they take their attention away from their main priority i.e. doing their jobs to the best level they can – to the detriment of all stakeholders.

How many of you work in organisations where an information vacuum is created or misinformation spreads? For example, management is so busy protecting itself from external threats – what will shareholders and/or analysts say – that they lose sight of a major internal threat, namely how staff will react if they have to learn about their future from the media?

Leaders have to hold their nerve

Although the worst of the global economic crisis appears to be over, fear and anxiety in employees remains high.

This is one of those critical times when leaders need self-discipline to Stop and Think before they Act. This will be hard if the leader is enduring The Almond Effect® but doesn’t realise it.

That could happen if they aren’t aware of The Almond Effect® and the role the amygdala plays even in non-life threatening situations. Or they haven’t developed the skill of recognising and responding appropriately to the physiological signs that our fight/flight response activates before our conscious brain kicks in.

Understanding this automatic brain activity is a fundamental component of developing self-awareness. And self-awareness is the core skill that distinguishes effective leaders from the rest.

How to do it
Self-aware leaders learn how to catch themselves in the clutches of The Almond Effect® before it clouds their judgment. This way they mostly avoid making poor decisions based primarily on irrational emotional responses not cognitive thinking.

There is no magic bullet to develop this skill. It’s takes commitment and practice. One way to start is to reflect on a past decision that didn’t deliver the outcome you had hoped for – this is Rewiring in STAR. It provides an opportunity to assess whether you would have made a different decision if you were in control of your emotions.

What were you feeling at that time? If you find it hard to remember exactly, recreate as much of the context and the situation as you can. It helps to describe it to someone or out loud to yourself. Write it down if you prefer. As you do this, your brain will take you back to that time and place and you will be able to recognise your emotions at the time.

When you have a handle on these, ask yourself whether the emotions were helpful or unhelpful? If they were unhelpful, where could they have been coming from? What could have triggered them? If you can, keep exploring until you work out whether the unhelpful emotions were based on some past experience. Then explore the similarities between the past experience and the one in which you didn’t make the best decision. There will be some fruitful learning in that.

Sometimes it’s not easy to find the source of the trigger. In that case, and in any event, train yourself to recognise your emotional state at any time and to Stop-Think-Act-Rewire. If you don’t then don’t be surprised if anxiety and other related emotions cloud your judgment and interfere with your best decision making skills.

CLUES Sharks, trains and brains

2009-08-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Twitter

I’ll be twittering in future! Quick tips and examples of The Almond Effect® and what to do about it. Help me get started. Follow me on Twitter

Alone at the station

8.15pm - alone on a long empty platform waiting for the 8.30pm train from London Paddington to Heathrow. Another person appeared. He had the entire platform to choose a spot to wait but he came and stood next to me. My heart started to race.

‘Stop it’ I said to my amygdala.

‘Calm down’ I said to my hypothalamus but it continued to flood my body with adrenaline.

All my amygdalae could see was a “young man of middle eastern appearance with a backpack.”

My pre-frontal cortex was appalled and embarrassed at my limbic system response. My cortex had no idea whether the young man was from the Middle East or not – and even if he was, so what?

I took deep breaths. I kept telling myself that my reaction was irrational and that my body should calm down.

Stop Think Act.

Eventually the 8.30pm train arrived. I stepped on, sat down and my heart rate slowed. I started to Rewire...

Deep in the ocean

Two months later, off the Neptune Islands in South Australia I was in a cage heading towards the ocean floor hoping to get up close and personal with some Great White Sharks.

One came soon enough - ‘Cheeky Girl’ – 4.2 metres and 1000 kg. She was BIG! And I saw her many teeth as she passed several times within a metre of me while she attempted to snatch the bait hanging off the back of the boat!

The 30 minutes in the cage passed in a flash.

But did my life flash before my eyes?

Back on board I realised that my heart rate had not increased at all when I came face to face with this enormous predator. All I felt was awe and wonder as I watched one of the most amazing animals I have ever seen.

So what was the difference? Why did I experience the fight/flight response so fully on a London train platform but not at all when within touching distance of a Great White Shark?

Preparing for sharks – the type we find at work

The answer lies in preparation and learning (Rewiring) from experience.

Some of you will recall from previous CLUES that I searched for GWS once before. But even with 3 days of turning the ocean red with burly including tuna heads, blood and guts – no shark appeared on that trip. So much for ‘blood in the water attracts sharks!’

However what we did do on that ‘no show’ trip was to talk a lot about GWS with experts, practice descents in the cage, watch videos, look at GWS photos and listen to research – all of which prepared us for the recent trip – and took away the fear.

In contrast, the man on the platform was a complete surprise. It was the end of a fabulous trip to the UK; I had just been shopping in Oxford Street and was looking forward to returning to Sydney.

I simply wasn’t focussed on what was happening on the platform or that any risks or dangers could be lurking there.

So I was unprepared for the possibility that a man could appear on the platform and trigger an ANT (automatic negative thought) that cracked my almonds (amygdalae) with a sledgehammer!

And I had no previous experience from which to train my amygdala not to react to a racist stereotype automatically stored in my brain’s ‘database of nasty things’ after September 11, 2001.

Face the fear and defuse the almonds

At work, ‘the man on the platform’ might turn up as a surprise outburst from the boss; an urgent deadline abruptly imposed; a retrenchment to be made, a dramatic fall in share price or an unanticipated cut in funding.

But ‘Cheeky Girl’ could show up when you anticipate the performance appraisal next week, a future presentation to the Board, an interview for a promotion, the switch over to a new system.

In other words, there will be some sudden and unexpected events that will catch us off guard. At those times, it is likely that we’ll experience The Almond Effect® - the fight/flight response - even though our lives are not at risk.

When that happens, use the STAR technique – and focus especially on Rewiring afterwards – what can you learn from the experience? The more times you experience something confronting, the less confronting it becomes. Your amygdala learns that it is nothing to be overly concerned about.

But do not beat yourself up for reacting even though your pre-frontal cortex knows you should not have. We are hard wired for survival and our amygdalae do not know the difference between physical and psychological threats.

However when you know that a ‘scary’ situation is coming up (Cheeky Girl) – do everything you can to minimise the impact of The Almond Effect® by preparing as much as possible. Show your amygdala that there are no potentially fatal consequences to what you are about to do.

Then perhaps you’ll even enjoy coming face to face with your Great White Shark

CLUES Gmail and Dare Iced Coffee fix The Almond Effect

2009-07-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

In this edition of CLUES, we look at two examples of STAR in action – Gmail and Dare Iced Milk. Then we see how it applies to leaders – or not!

‘I wish I hadn’t sent that’: Gmail now using STAR

The whole point of learning STAR, the antidote to The Almond Effect®, is to stop ourselves acting impulsively, in the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, when something stirs us up or catches us off-guard.

In the Gmail Labs, there is a fabulous tool that is doing just that. It gives us a second chance to Stop and Think before we send an email we will regret.

Turn on the ‘Undo Send’ feature in Gmail then when you hit ‘send’, Gmail will pause for 5 seconds before actually sending the email. If you realise in that time (and we usually know in an instant when we have done something and wish we hadn’t), you press simply ‘Undo’ and Gmail redirects the email to your draft box. Email not sent - no harm done!

It’s STAR in action

If you’re looking for an example of (assisted!) STAR in action, this is it: Stop, Think, Act, Rewire.

Gmail Stops the sending for you, giving you time to Think about what you’ve just done and what your real intention and the consequences might be.

It gives you 5 seconds to Act and press ‘undo’ if necessary. And if you press ‘undo’ it pops it back into your Drafts box so you can Rewire i.e. review and rewrite the email til it’s ready for you to send.

Now all we want is an ‘undo send’ mechanism for our mouths, facial expressions and our body language!

Watch The Almond Effect® in action

One of the recent ads for Dare Iced Coffee is all about The Almond Effect®.

Watch the imaginary fearful outcomes the guy’s 'almonds' (amygdalae) trigger in the split second after the woman says “hey babe, can we grab a coffee?” And see him use STAR to suggest an alternative course of action that will keep him out of harm’s way! Watch it here

What sets leaders (and losers) apart

The July 2009 Vol 10 edition of Boss magazine published its list of Young Executives of the Year

What was interesting was the list of tendencies of those who didn’t have what it takes to get on the list:

* Have good ideas but lack the ability to execute them
* Have closed discussions and make assumptions
* Derail frequently and let the dark side of their personality affect their work and relationships at work
* Be arrogant rather than inclusive
* Miss opportunities to use empathy
* Micro-manage instead of delegate
* Be impulsive rather than evidence based in decision
* Lack perception about how others are feeling
* Get confused about managing who they are as people and what’s required in the role

Almost everything on the list stems from inadequate insights about themselves, what makes them who they are and their affect on others – in other words self-leadership.

A huge component of that involves The Almond Effect® - understanding how the stressors and challenges of everyday life trigger our primitive survival (flight/fight/flock/freeze) instincts.

The best leaders know that each one of us is the sum of our experiences and that, unless we monitor our behaviours and actions, our brains are hardwired will take us by shortest, most well trodden route to action. This is fine if the action is appropriate but not fine if we end up reacting in ways that are inappropriate either for others or for ourselves.

The change organ

Our brains can and do change – it’s called neuroplasticity. However, it takes courage to deeply examine what makes us tick and triggers our immediate non-thinking behaviours.

Changing embedded patterns of behaviour can be hard without determination and practice.

We can change our brains by changing our minds. But you have to stay on track. Understanding The Almond Effect® and mastering STAR helps you do that.

CLUES Worried about job security?

2009-05-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

This edition is about keeping yourself and your people calm when jobs are under threat

Are you feeling secure in your job? How about your partner? Or your children or parents or friends?

And what about your team? Your colleagues? Your boss?

On the basis of reports about the predicted increase in unemployment rates over the next year or two, the fallout from the GFC (global financial crisis) shows little sign of easing.

Stimulus payouts and other Government initiatives may provide some financial assistance in the short term but will do little to ease the day to day anxiety, stress and uncertainty that many people feel as they go to work wondering: “Will I still have my job tomorrow?”

Have you seen it all before?

For some CLUES readers, you have lived through periods of recession when redundancies were prolific. And we hoped we would never see the likes of, for example, the early 1990’s, again.

But if we do have to go through it again, we must hope that organisations learn from those past experiences and remember that making large numbers of people redundant often ripped out the organisational heart and deleted large chunks of corporate memory.

Redundancies may deliver a short term financial solution but is false economy if past experience is anything to go by. In the long term not only can they can significant impede capacity to compete swiftly again once the economy improves but in the short term the impact on morale and productivity can be significant and self-defeating.

The same applies when training programs are cut out.

Or is this your first time?

For other CLUES readers, aged under 35, this is new territory. After over 25 years of strong economic times, of abundance, growth and wealth, the global economy has gone through an unprecedented negative turnaround.

Consequently even though you may have been told your job is safe, uncertainty and worries about job security are likely to lurk in your back of your mind and niggle at you.

If you haven’t been re-assured and are seeing your workforce being reduced, these worries will be front of mind.

If you were reassured that jobs were safe but saw people lose their jobs anyway, then not only will the trust factor have plummeted but it’s going to be hard to contain your anxiety levels and still perform well – thus increasing your anxiety and so the vicious cycle goes on.

For an even younger group of people (teens and under 25), used to change as a way of life, the GFC has brought a whopping lifestyle modification with it. For many, gone are the days of extravagant living and job-hopping, of being able to pick, choose and change jobs at will.

Holding on to the job you’ve got is now the name of the game for many young Australians. At the very least they are concerned for their friends.

Managing the people around you

The Almond Effect® is when our brains activate the flight/flight mode for the wrong reasons. We are not about to die but as our amygdala can’t tell the difference between a physical threat and a psychological threat to our survival it sets off its armies of adrenaline, hormones and other chemicals to enable us to repel the threat or get well away from it.

So if despite assurances or logical analysis, our amygdalae sense a threat to job security and/or the need to keep performing well to hold on to a job, be prepared for increased stress and anxiety levels which, unless managed, will impede performance anyway.

Your best approach is to look for signs of the flight/fight mode in yourself and the people around you. Then you can deal with it.

What you might see

Here are some examples of the kinds of behaviours you might see:

* Unanswered phones
* Increased conflict and disputes
* Sharp barbed responses
* Lethargy
* Increased gossiping
* Martyr like behaviour
* People coming to work when they are sick
* Fun has gone
* Reduced motivation
* Busyness increases but strategic thinking diminishes
* Lack of focus
* Inability to concentrate or retain information
* Short temperedness
* Lack of confidence
* Not taking on new challenges
* Not taking holidays

A free ebook of Strategies for Success from Leading Experts in Personal and Professional Development is yours if you send me your examples of The Almond Effect® in your life at work or at home Click here

What to do about it?

When people are anxious they need the truth. Without honest information, people fill the vacuum with fears and concerns. They also need an opportunity to share their anxieties even if you have to supportively coax that out of them.

What does NOT work is avoid talking about the situation, lying or fudging the truth or trying to maintain a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude.

So here are some tips:

* Share information – keep people up to date with what you know. And it’s better to over communicate than not share enough. It’s rare that an employee will tell you to stop talking to them about what’s going on.

* Acknowledge concerns and create opportunities to discuss them either one on one or in person. Don’t brush this ‘under the carpet’.

* Look for the warning signs (like those above) that people are stressed or anxious. They might deny it but amygdalae don’t shut off just because we want to hide our feelings.

* Consult with your people about how to handle situations and challenges. Not only will they probably have great ideas but it also dampens down The Almond Effect and shows that you value their input.

* Lead by example and stay positive. This means using your STAR skills (Stop-Think-Act-Rewire). Remember that emotions are contagious.

* Stick to your values – personal and organisational. People will pick up inconsistencies in a heartbeat and that ignites The Almond Effect.

* Keep yourself fit, stay calm and eat properly. Get rid of your own excess adrenaline and stress hormones. Walk, run, swim, play football – whatever works for you, just use up those fight/flight chemicals that are hanging around in your bloodstream. As the safety demonstration on planes tell us- look after yourself first so that you can help others.

* Educate your people about The Almond Effect® and what to do about it. Click here to contact Anne about how she can help you do this.

"If you want to be impressed with a depth of expertise, stimulated by new understanding about yourself and leadership and entertained, then Anne should be top of your list.

The impact of her presentation has lived on beyond the day. Some of our leaders are experimenting with her ideas and concepts, especially in the context of strengthening positive relationships with their staff and having some new tools to help with tough issues. Tim Robinson, Executive Manager Corporate Support, Fairfield City Council”

CLUES What Sharks teach us about Decision-Making

2009-03-25T01:33:00.001-07:00

Two questions for you:

1. Do you consider yourself to be a good decision maker? Yes or No?

2. Would you go swimming at the world famous Bondi Beach where a shark attack occurred earlier this year? The beach has been closed on a number of occasions since because a shark has been spotted in the area? Yes or No?

If you answered Yes to question one and No to question 2 then I want you to reconsider your first answer. Are you really a good decision-maker?

Risk, reality and The Almond Effect®

Many people answer No to the second question because of The Almond Effect® which compromises our ability to evaluate risk because we are not thinking clearly, if at all.

The chances of getting killed by a shark are infinitesimally small. The recent non-fatal attack on Bondi Beach was the first in 86 years.

The fatality rate in the early 20th century was 3.8 a year in Australia. In the early 21st century that statistic has decreased to 1.2 deaths each year Australia wide even though every year, due to population increases, better transport and a continuing love of the outdoors, a greater number of people swim in the ocean, race in ocean swim challenges (like me!), paddle beyond the break on surf boards, dive and snorkel, kayak and fish dangling bait off the back of boats.

And of course, there are other reasons for the decreased mortality rates including smaller shark populations, netted beaches, no sewerage being dumped off the coast, faster rescues (if you’re at a patrolled beach) and better emergency medical care.

Decision making involves the assessment of risk

So logically, there is very little risk at all if you are one of the thousands of people who every week, 52 weeks a year, year in year out, swim at Bondi, one beach out of 35,000 kms of Australian coastline.

But our brains are hard-wired for survival and most of our amygdalae have seen Jaws or at least heard of it. Or have picked up on other people’s fear of sharks and so, just to be on the safe side, our brains have popped these images and fears into our own databases of things to be frightened of.

Lodge this data into your thinking brain:

In 2000 – 2006 the number of deaths caused by:
* Horses: 40
* Cows: 20
* Dogs: 12
* Sharks: 10
* Snakes: 3 - 4
* Bees: 2 - 3
* Road accidents: 1616 (in 2007)

* Drowning: 400 times greater risk than being taken by a shark

* Shark experts’ assessment of risk of being attacked by a shark: 264.1 million to 1

Source: AFR Jan 31- Feb 1 2009 quoting NCIS statistics

Logically it is much safer to swim at Bondi than to do almost anything else, including travelling by any means to get there. But unless you are a STAR and have mastered your primeval hard-wiring, my guess is that, even if you do get safely to the beach and go into the water, you now stay close to shore and stay between the red flags – and the Lifeguards are grateful for that!

Emotions, Decision Making and Veto power

The link between sharks and decision making is that you can’t make decisions in the absence of feelings. People who say they can are either kidding themselves, have learned the art of managing their emotions or simply don’t know what the neuroscientists tell us about the way our brain works.

The key to good decision making is to acknowledge and deal with the feelings attached to any decision in a calm considered way and not simply by default. Let me explain.

We know from the work of Joseph le Doux that healthy brains react emotionally first. We‘ve covered this before in previous editions of CLUES.

Our brain’s default position is to minimize danger and maximize reward.

But Benjamin Libet who conducted various neuroscientific experiments from 1983 until his death in 2007 gave us another piece of the brain puzzle. He concluded that we have the power of Veto over our brain’s default position.

This Veto power is at the heart of the STAR method for managing The Almond Effect® - training ourselves to choose our response to a situation as opposed to simply reacting without thinking.

Libet found (and other researchers have subsequently confirmed) that from the moment something enters our brains through our senses for processing until the moment we become consciously aware of it and have a desire to respond is about .2 to .3 of a second.

Libet says we will respond to that stimulus on default in about .5 of a second.

That means we have about .2 of a second to recognise the stimulus for what it is, then choose to override the default position and select the best course of action to take to get the best outcomes.

So in a situation where our amygdala perceives a threat (eg a snake or a piece of black hosepipe), we have .2 of a second to ascertain whether it is a real threat or simply The Almond Effect® kicking in – to ascertain whether the ‘threat’ is truly imperilling our lives or it just feels like it at that instant on the limbic system’s fast and cursory review of past experiences.

In that .2 of a second we can go with the default reaction (jump back or hit it with a spade) or choose what not to do i.e. exercise a power of Veto over our brain’s automatic survival mechanism by quickly focussing attention on the object, registering that it’s just a piece of pipe and therefore choosing to ignore it.

Veto Power in action

What this means is that whether we are about to go swimming at Bondi Beach or are confronted with an angry employee, a request for a ‘quick meeting’ from the boss, a ‘can I talk to you’ phone call from your spouse, an imminent performance management meeting, a ‘look’ from your manager or any number of situations that your amygdala can misinterpret, we have .2 of a second to focus attention and then choose our response.

For an instant we can be a fly on the wall, an impartial observer, someone on the outside looking in.

We can then simply do nothing and go with our default flight/fight/freeze or flock reaction.

Or we can be a STAR. We can Stop – notice that our amygdala is on red alert - we might be shaking, heart racing, blushing, feeling instantly sick etc. Then Think – i.e. do something to calm ourselves down so we can access the logical part of our brains. Only then will we Act, do what we choose to do. Later on, we’ll Rewire, reflect on the situation, on what we learned and embed the positive responses or think of ways to prevent any unhelpful reactions.

What kinds of decisions are being made during the GFC?

Personally I’m much more concerned with bluebottles than sharks. And I’m much more concerned about the decisions of some employers and managers in the current global financial crisis, who may be failing to acknowledge and take into account the impact that their personal fears and insecurities on the quality of their decision-making. These are people who do not understand the power of Veto and the STAR methodology.

Coaches and Mentors have a major role to play here, to hold up a mirror of reflection and ask decision-makers to honestly assess the feelings that they have that underlie the decisions they make.

However it happens, assessing the impact of our emotions and experiences on our decisions would be a significant step forward in the challenge to rebuild confidence in our economic future. Share the concept of the Veto power and STAR with decision-makers everywhere you can. And don’t be afraid to go swimming at Bondi Beach!

Clues on Uncertainty- the biggest fear of all

2009-02-17T23:19:00.001-08:00

Uncertainty is the most crippling fear we can experience. But we create uncertainty ourselves, no-one does it to us. So if we
can create it, we can learn to manage it. Listen now for the CLUES you need.

CLUES Are you worried about money?

2009-01-21T22:13:00.000-08:00

There has never been a more important time to be emotionally strong and mentally tough, to control your amygdala rather than the other way around.

Job cuts are now announced daily. We see iconic brand employers laying off staff. We watch well known retailers closing their doors. Does it cross your mind: “will I be next?”

In most organisations you will be under pressure to cut costs, reduce budgets, remain competitive, deal with your employees’ uncertainty and stress as well as your own and yet still manage your team’s performance for strong results in an economy lacking in confidence and optimism.

And how are things at home?

We haven’t even started to talk about the pressures and decisions you might be faced with at home.

If you have young kids – how do they ‘get it’ that in the course of six months, the ground has shifted under things they took for granted.

If you have parents – are they fretting about the drop in the value of their superannuation fund – in some cases of 50% or more. At least with our parents, many of them lived through tough economic times before – and if they can keep their ‘almonds’ under control, they’ll know it’s cyclical. But who would blame them for saying – I may not have time to wait out the cycle!

Don’t succumb to The Almond Effect®

It would be easy to give in to fear and alarm. That’s what your amygdala wants you to do. That’s what The Almond Effect® is all about. It’s the stronger and dominating emotional response – it’s automatic while being calm and optimistic requires a deliberate choice.

Remember it is The Almond Effect® that initially caused (and is still causing) people to react to appalling financial events way out of proportion to the threat that existed at that time. I strongly hold the view that this global financial and economic mess is the result of uncontrolled panic and fear reactions to perceived threats that in many cases were not real – but our reactions have now given those fears substance and reality.

I want him on my plane

In stark contrast think about the way Captain Sullenberger landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson River on January 18 saving the lives of all 155 people on board.

Through his training and experience, the pilot showed complete mastery over the potential disastrous consequences of The Almond Effect®. Using his pre-frontal cortex (PFC) he over-rode his amygdala – and focussed on acting calmly and logically to get the best possible outcome to the crisis. I am sure that the passengers and crew were also very happy that he also glided planes for a hobby!

Yes we can

The saving of Flight 1549 was an example of self-control in a life threatening situation. You too can do this and rule your amygdala - especially in challenging but not actually life threatening situations such as the ones the economy is creating right now.

Lack of confidence, fear about the future – you can discipline yourself to think rationally and with hope about what this really means for you. Learn to ‘Flick the Switch’.

Flick the Switch

Here is an introduction to one of the tools we use when teaching the STAR method for mastery of The Almond Effect®. It is a simple process that we can use to respond thoughtfully rather than react emotionally.

I created the tool based on research from neuroscientists showing that a conscious act such as naming our emotions produces a decrease in amygdalic activity and an opportunity for the PFC to assert control. It is a clear example of STAR in action Stop - Think – Act – Rewire.

You’ll learn to do this quickly in your head but do it on paper the first time and at any time when you want to really take the time to think through what’s worrying you.

Create it as a flow chart for optimum visual impact.

What’s worrying me most at the moment?
Can I control it?

Yes
Best outcome?
How can I work towards this?
Physical actions? Now/future?
State of mind needed? Now/future?
What does the change and outcome look like?
Activate feeling or behaviour!
Triggers/techniques to Flick the Switch!

Worst outcome
How can I work to minimize this?
Physical actions? Now/future?
State of mind needed? Now/future?
What does the change and outcome look like?
Activate feeling or behaviour!
Triggers/techniques to Flick the Switch!

No
What can I do to manage my stress?
Physical actions? Now/future?
State of mind needed? Now/future?
What does the change and outcome look like?
Activate feeling or behaviour!
Triggers/techniques to Flick the Switch!

We expand, explore and practice these steps in our workshops. If you want more information on our workshops and tools, let me know.

Stop reacting, start responding at work

A major concern I have about the rapid increase in redundancies and sackings is the message it sends not just about the organisation’s lack of loyalty and compassion but its lack of leadership insight, courage, tenacity and strategic thinking. Not just to the retrenched but to all staff and customers.

We’ve been through it before in the 80’s and the 90’s. Mass redundancies and layoffs in a panic situation resulting in lowered engagement, innovation, teamwork and performance – everything that organisations in the 00s have invested in.

And will organisational history repeat itself? In the past, these actions resulted in bringing about the very things they thought they would avoid including increased costs, poor retention, low engagement and re-hiring on a more expensive basis.

Clever organisations and thoughtful leaders will react strategically at this time. They will not be frightened. They will see it as an opportunity to review, change and revisit the existing way of doing things. They will make hard but wise decisions with a view to the future as well as the short-term. They will respond not react.

And most importantly of all, they will stay the course back to prosperity and success. That will take intestinal fortitude on their part and yours.

Stop reacting, start responding at home

It’s a similar message for home. If you apply the same thinking you’ll insert a pause before acting, you’ll consciously take time to reflect and plan your responses, you won’t panic, fret and stress.

STAR tools can help you achieve that ability– based on neuroscientific research that is unlocking doors into the reasons why people behave the way they do – and what to do about it.

Scared again - I’m practising what I preach

This weekend I am swimming in the scary 2.7km ocean swim from Palm Beach to Whale Beach – my response to the cancer-related deaths of family and friends and for so many other friends who are dealing with this dreadful disease.

Thank you to the many of you have supported me with your words and your sponsorship in my quest to raise funds for Cancer Research. Perhaps the short video I sent influenced that - see it at www.anneriches.com.au/AnneCanSwim.html

In any event I want you to know that I am Flicking the Switch every time I think about the swim. If I wasn’t actively using STAR tools, I know I would be feeling sick (and wanting to break a leg or something so I didn’t have to do it) at the thought of Sunday. The adrenaline is still running I can assure you but I am visualising what it will be like to emerge from the sea at Whale Beach in one piece and constantly Flicking the Switch to that feeling.

I’ll let you know how I go.

You can still be part of Team Anne

And it’s not too late to sponsor me – it truly adds to the motivation I need to conquer The Almond Effect® and get into the water. Please go to www.anneriches.com.au/AnneCanSwim.html to be part of Team Anne as my wonderful supporters call themselves. I would be really appreciative of any contribution no matter how small.

Hope you enjoyed this edition of CLUES.

Till next time, take care.

CLUES How will you make decisions in 2009

2008-12-14T18:49:00.000-08:00

How will you make decisions in 2009? Logically or emotionally?

I didn’t know whether we would live or die. Nearly 10 years ago, on March 22, 1999 my husband and I were trapped in the centre of category 5 Cyclone Vance when it hit Exmouth, Western Australia. We were there for a scuba diving trip. The storm surge was predicted to be 3.6 metres so we got our scuba gear ready – potentially to use inside our holiday townhouse!

Happily we survived the devastation unharmed and indeed returned to Exmouth the following year to dive with the Whale Sharks as originally planned. Although 10% of all the buildings were either destroyed or damaged, Exmouth had rebuilt and looked beautiful.

How will you live out the global financial storm?
I’m sharing this story with you because the current global financial downturn might feel as devastating as a category 5 cyclone. Some people already have or will lose their jobs. Some will feel their homes and incomes are at risk. Some will see, as I have done, superannuation and retirement funds slashed and plans that were dependent on these funds, have now dramatically changed.

Many people will worry about their financial situation. And your brain won’t help you during this time, unless you take charge of it – not the other way around.

Logical or emotional decision-making – YOU decide

At the risk of sounding like an old record – please remember the essence of what I’ve been speaking and writing about for years. It will help you weather any storm.

Your brain automatically focuses on your fears. As you know I call this The Almond Effect®. And what we are experiencing now is the worst economic example of this – when fears have become a reality.

Although a correction was due in some places, I believe the world financial situation is a psychological over-reaction by governments and businesses that everyday people are caught in. It should not have gone as far as it has but as we know, toxic emotions are contagious. We have seen a global spread of negative emotion at a speed and with an intensity that is almost impossible to believe.

So right now I encourage you to stay in control of your lives. You can keep your fears, anxieties and worries in check in your life and your decision making by using my STAR approach. Take the time to read about it again now. I know it will help you.

Be a STAR

S - Stop: simply take notice the moment you become aware that fear, anxiety, uncertainty are impacting you and your ability to ‘think straight’. Your body will tell you – increased heart rate, tummy churning over, tears forming, flushed face, the shakes – everyone responds in their own way. How does your body tell you your brain is stressed?

T – Think: immediately take several deep breaths to minimize the impact of the adrenaline that’s swirling around your body. Acknowledge that your emotions are in play and ask yourself: Where are they coming from? What’s triggering this?

A – Act: Do something to control your emotions before you make any decisions. Here’s an idea from one of my closest friends: “I imagine my fears and anxieties are tied to me with string. Then I cut the string and let them fall away.” It’s a great idea.

And here’s the approach I use most: First, I name out loud the emotion I’m feeling: e.g. ‘I am feeling really anxious right now.’ (Or words to that effect!) Then I ask myself: ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen? And what would I do about it?’ This usually works – because both of these techniques engage the logical part of the brain and slow down our amygdalae. With practice, you can, at will, override your immediate emotional reactions.

R. - Rewire: Practice this over and over – whenever you feel your mind being clouded by irrational thoughts. You’ll be amazed at how much control you build into your life, the quality of the decisions you make and the relationships you have with others.

Me in a cozzie - Support me in my Craziness

Occasionally over the last two years I have shared with you my personal examples of overcoming The Almond Effect® in my quest to raise funds for cancer research as I learn to swim in the ocean and participate in ocean races.

If you’re interested and want to see how I’m going, please enjoy the short picture show http://www.anneriches.com.au/AnneCanSwim.html and if you feel inclined to support me, that would be so appreciated.

In any event, enjoy the 4 minute video! http://www.anneriches.com.au/AnneCanSwim.html

Happy Holidays

For those of you who celebrate Christmas – I hope you have a wonderful time with your family and friends or whoever you choose to spend this time with.

Even those of you who do not celebrate at this time, will inevitably get caught up in the season. So to all of you, warm wishes for a safe and happy holiday period.

And I wish you a fearless 2009 when you turn challenges into opportunities and potentially difficult times into the best outcome you could have dreamed for.
Take care

CLUES How much is your ego costing you?

2008-11-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

Which is more important – your ego or your cash?

What level is your credit card or frequent flyer status? Bronze? Platinum? Does it matter? I never even stopped to think about this until recently.

Some good friends were teasing me because I have a high tier frequent flyer card but I couldn’t see the joke. It meant I had a reasonable place to wait for flights, that I might not be the first to get bumped off an oversold flight and that occasionally, the staff member at the aircraft door would call me by my name instead of simply being told to take the second aisle.

So I suggested to my friends that their banter was just “card envy” But it stopped me in my tracks and made me think when David said: “well my goal is to have bronze”.

Bronze? His goal? He went on: “If I had bronze instead of platinum, it would mean that I wouldn’t be travelling as much and would be at home with my family more.”
What an insight. He’d certainly sorted out his priorities and made me think about mine.

Pre-approved – for more fees!

This issue of card status and its implications came up for me again when I got an unsolicited letter from the bank telling me I had been pre-approved for a platinum credit card.

Of course, in playing to our egos, what the banks don’t emphasise is that if we take up the higher level card it is accompanied by a higher credit limit, encouraging us to spend more. And if we don’t pay off our credit card accounts each month, the bank achieves its aim in sending out the pre-approval, i.e. to earn more interest.

So I got out all my credit cards and added up how much these cards were costing me in annual fees. The nasty thing about these fees is that unless you keep track of when they are due, the only time you are reminded of them is when they appear on your statement and that’s after they’ve been charged to your account.

Then there are the membership reward scheme fees on top.

So I started to do some analysis about what I really need my cards for. And then comparing that with the level of the card I had. I soon realised that I was paying for more expensive (higher level) cards when I didn’t need them.

What’s more, I didn’t need the extended credit limits and I would have to earn an enormous number of frequent flyer points to justify the difference between the costs of some of the cards. It would be cheaper to shop around for a discount fare!

Status and reward

So why was I hesitating in changing the cards? I began to think that my amygdala (and The Almond Effect - in this case an irrational fear of how it will look to others to have an ‘inferior’ card) was getting in the way of my downgrading from gold and platinum cards so I started to explore why.

It seems that reputation and standing (status) could be more important to our brain than cash. According to one of the authors describing an experiment in a study published in April this year in Neuron the part of the brain called: ‘the striatum became just as animated when players were given a shot at improving their social standing as it did when they won a buck...

And that wasn't the only indicator that they cared about how others perceived them... another brain region (the medial prefrontal cortex) involved in sizing up others went wild when players were shown photos of competitors who outperformed them.’

Hmmm. Maybe that’s the explanation for why, when I split the lunch bill with a friend the other day, and I put down a gold credit card and he put down platinum, I momentarily felt, well, of lower status!

And The Almond Effect® also is implicated. The researchers went on to note: ‘brain areas that process emotional pain (the amygdala and posterior cingulate) lit up when players failed to answer questions that inferior competitors had aced. The researchers speculated that this is because they were worried it would diminish their reputations as superior players.

The power of status in rational decision-making

Some of you will also remember the work of Robert Cialdini on Influence. Linking his work and the status theme, the way that status lights up parts of our brains reminds me of the mental heuristics (or shortcuts) that Cialdini talks about. In particular I’m thinking about his research on how we respond to social proof (“keeping up with the Joneses’) and to authority where Cialdini writes that people will tend to obey authority figures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts.

Authority and the perceived value of status seem closely connected to me. And this raises the whole question of how we make decisions and what we sub-consciously allow ourselves to be influenced by.

Managing your almonds (and your striatum!)

Coincidentally as I thought about these things, I was revisiting the writings of Viktor Frenkl. In particular the latter part of the following quote resonated with me:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And this:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Gold, Platinum and the patience to do something about it

As I write this at my desk, I now have three credit cards sitting in front of me. These are the cards that I am going to cancel or downgrade because I simply don’t need them - even though I like their colour!

As we face the fallout of the global almond effect (that’s the way I described the global financial crisis in the last CLUES) maybe, as I have done, this is a good time to ask yourself what you really need and whether your ego is costing you? Is it worth it?

And of course, the issue of status and ego goes way beyond credit cards and into the world of work where the ‘status card’ gets dealt endlessly by bosses to employees and by others who like to play with power and politics. Maybe that should be the topic for another CLUES.

In the meantime, I’m struggling with other parts of my brain including the amygdala. The parts that deal with garnering the patience and tolerance I’m going to need when I speak with the banks about changing or cancelling my credit cards.

Maybe that’s the real challenge here, not the potentially high cost of status but the emotional cost that has to be endured when trying to do something about it!

CLUES A Global Almond Effect

2008-11-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

CLUES Put your money under the bed

A few weeks ago I was in Brussels. Walking to a restaurant to have dinner about 7.30pm one evening, I noticed an unusually large number of people at a Dexia Bank cashpoint (ATM) queuing to withdraw money.

I remembered that it had been reported, earlier in the day, that Dexia was in trouble. It was a striking example that the global financial crisis had hit. I was instantly reminded of events I had read about where people had made a run on the banks to withdraw their funds to protect them but I never honestly though I would see that in October 2008 in the city of the European Union headquarters.

Panic spreads quickly

In a matter of months, or was it weeks, major economies of the world crashed. Banks collapsed, companies folded, stock markets took the concept of roller coasters to a new dimension, and people became scared – for their jobs, for their homes, for their lifestyle, for their futures.
Potential retirees have watched the value of their superannuation funds plummet and are now revisiting their retirement plans. Those who have retired are watching the value of their assets declining and wished they had more in cash.
Many businesses started to experience bad debts, decreased orders and supplies. Some are starting to contemplate closures and foreclosures.

A Global Almond Effect(R)

Never have so many banks got into so much trouble taking the rest of the world with them. Their excesses and recklessness have caused havoc.

Fear, uncertainty and anxiety are rampant. Humiliated CEOs and many senior executives have been and will be sacked as taxpayers have to bail out financial institutions, providing guarantees to save businesses and to stop people putting their money under their beds!

If we ever imagined a global example of The Almond Effect® – this is it. As the full extent of this crisis is revealed and when history reflects on it and its aftermath, we will see decisions and actions driven by recklessness, fear, anxiety and uncertainty.

Amygdalas – unable to perceive the difference between real and psychological threat – will cause, and have caused people to act rashly, unmediated by their pre-frontal cortexes; i.e. without thinking.

Stay in control

This is one of those times when we have to be really clear about what is going on in our own heads and stay in control. While Governments try to sort out this mess, the most important thing that we can do is remain calm.
Yes it will be tough. Our brains hate uncertainty. We pass most of our days, weeks and years in routine and predictability – responding to patterns that our brains have been laid down over time to enable us to get on with our lives without needing to continuously create new pathways.

Too much change – even welcome change – can place significant demands on our working memories resulting in tiredness, anxiety and an inability to think straight. Add the stress caused as the adrenaline flows when our amygdalas respond to the media bombardment of gloom and doom and heartbreak – no wonder there are reported increases in calls for help to corporate employee assistance programs.

Nothing to fear but fear itself

Roosevelt said: we have nothing to fear but fear itself. So put the STAR model into action immediately.

Stop. Try to notice when you are getting caught up and impacted by the headlines, the TV and radio reports and the worrying talk of others. When you catch yourself, take a deep breath and notice what is happening to you.

Think: how much of it is directly impacting on you. How much is your life going to change? The magnitude of this crisis is in the order of (though of course, different from) September 11 - and just like then, the world will change.
But at the time of 9/11 when lives were lost and the laws of 'war' were rewritten, people worried that it would be impossible for the world to ever be 'normal' again. Yet normalcy did return. Think about that. Take the time to consider and plan for the future to the extent that you need to make changes.

Act: Then act according to your plan and stay the course. Constantly monitor what is happening to you and to the people you care about.

Don’t get caught up in the emotional contagion of others. If you see friends, family and colleagues getting upset, explain to them what is happening in their brains and The Almond Effect® and share the STAR model.

Rewire: If you’ve been through other demanding events, review how you got through them and see what you can apply to this situation.

Cliché time: the sun will rise tomorrow and Australia will win the Rugby world Cup again one day

OK – I’m ever the optimist! But do keep things in perspective. It was only a few weeks ago that climate change was the most important item on the global agenda. I have a feeling it’s slipped!

Remember some of the other occasions in your lives when you thought it couldn’t get any tougher. You came through. We’ll all come through this one. Interestingly it might just be easier for those of us who have lived through these sorts of events before. It will be tougher for the younger people who have never experienced depressions, recessions and horrendous interest rates – their neurons will have to make some new pathways!

It’s not going to be easy as we see jobs slashed and home values fall. But, as longtime readers of CLUES, you have the skills to manage your emotional responses at this time. It won’t fix the situation but at least you’ll be making some calm, rational decisions about the way forward.

CLUES Great shark expectations

2008-09-17T02:57:00.001-07:00

In this edition, I’m going to talk about how life’s little surprises can sometimes catch us out – and what to do about it! In particular I’m going to talk about the role of expectations at work.

CLUES What's the difference between my dad and going to work?

2008-08-20T02:04:00.001-07:00

Do you fight fear with fear?

When a member of your team gives you a scare - how do you respond? If you let your amygdala do the talking - they may well do the walking!

CLUES Procrastination - do you? Or would you like to answer that later?

2008-07-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

Do you procrastinate? Put off stuff you really want to do (or think you do) and then beat yourself up for not doing it?

In my most recent newsletter I've looked at this topic and talked about why we procrastinate and what to do about it. If you want to read more sign up for CLUES on the right or go to http://www.anneriches.com/

I've also asked my readers to share their examples and what they think are the reasons. I'll summarize them here soon. In the meantime - would love to hear your examples, don't put off sharing them!

CLUES Fears at Work

2008-06-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

I recently conducted a survey asking what are your fears at work?

There were some interesting responses. For example:

Hi Anne...I work as a Contracts Manager [new role in the last 5 months]...my 'fear' is not knowing what to advise or worst still, giving the wrong advice, when a contractual issue arises...people [clients, managers & my staff] rely on me to be correct...this is sometimes difficult...my strategy at present is to research/consult/evaluate options & risk before advice...works at the moment, but sometimes demands exceed timelines with my strategy. What do you think?

Other 'fears' included:

Discussing with people why they are accountable for their actions, and that it is not necessarily someone else's fault or problem.

Performance appraisal interviews

Providing different opinion to manager or colleagues and having to prove my point confidently.

Care to comment on or add to the list?

CLUES Up close and personal

2007-01-15T17:59:00.000-08:00

They say you teach what you most need to learn - but did I need to be reminded so dramatically?

CLUES Talk to the boss!

2006-12-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

Ever been apprehensive about talking to the CEO? You need to deal with it or it could become a career limiting move. Listen here for tips on talking with the boss.

CLUES The jealous amydgala

2006-11-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes jealousy can really cost us. In this edition of CLUES listen to an extract of 'Where Did That Come From?' If you want more go to www.AnneRiches.com/almond-effect.html

CLUES I don't intend to die

2006-11-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you have to choose. Why are we so poor at succession planning? It's our amygdala again. Listen here for more.

CLUES Teenage brains - an emotional cauldron

2006-10-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Teenagers seem to be risk taking, fearless and reckless at times. It's not just their hormones - it's the way their brain is developing. Listen hear for more information.

CLUES My husband won't hold my hand!

2006-10-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ever done irrational things based on old emotion memories? And are you risk averse or risk seeking? Listen here for some answers.

CLUES Look at me when I'm talking to you

2006-09-27T00:58:00.000-07:00

Have you ever found yourself saying: Look at me when I'm talking to you! Well you might get a better answer if they don't. Listen here if you want to know why.

CLUES The Croc Hunter and the racing car driver

2006-09-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

Last week Australia lost two icons - two fearless men. Listen here for more about their fear, or lack of it, and the worrying impact of anticipation

CLUES Fast but maybe furious!

2006-08-29T19:28:00.000-07:00

Do you make 'snap judgments'? Of course you do and that's important in life threatening situations - but is it OK at work? and can you do anything about it? Listen and find out.

CLUES The High Cost of Gutlessness

2006-08-11T01:37:00.000-07:00

Lack of courage may be costing your organisation money, people and customers. listen and find out why and what to do about it.

I burst into tears - was there a better way to handle it? (Cirstie)

2006-08-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

Cirstie wrote:
All the girls in our office decided to go out for a girls lunch. We asked our boss (male) would that be ok and he said yes but he didn't look happy. However upon our return he was agitated and called me into the office (being the supervisor) and blasted me about all and sundry. He was so angry he was shaking and really the things he was saying were just ridiculous. There are 6 of us so we all went in different cars and he timed how long we took etc. I truly believe it was an almond reaction to not being invited to lunch. Anyhow I burst into tears because he was being so unreasonable. Did I therefore have an almond reaction to his aggressiveness and is there a better way I could have handled it?

Here's my reply:
Phew!! From what you say, it was a classic Almond Effect ® on his part! I wonder what that was about? What was he anxious about? Was there work to be done that he was frustrated might not get done and he had a lot riding on it? Was he fearful about being left out, talked about? Has he got a problem with a group of women having fun because of some past experience? I can’t possibly know without talking to him and I guess you can’t know unless you asked him. But certainly from what you have told me, your diagnosis was right.

As for your reaction, probably also right but don’t beat yourself up! Without you wanting it to do this when surprises like that happen, your amygdala interprets the event as a threat to job security, good relations with your boss, i.e. life as you know and want it – and then we react in ways that surprise us (the logical us) and afterwards we regret what we did!! Just learn from it and ask yourself what you could do differently if it ever happened again.

Without wishing to sound commercial, that why I wrote the E-book Where Did That Come From? – it gives a lot of examples of what other people have done and do in similar situations, starting with the ability to recognise what is happening to you and learning to distract your amygdala so your top brain has time to click in and get you back in control.

Hope that helps – whatever you do, don’t let it get to you. If you need to clear the air with him, think clearly how you’re going to do it, even write out a script and practice it with a person who loves you and wants to help, then go to it. Doing this pre-warns your amygdala that the situation is going to arise and hopefully allows you to stay more in control.

Otherwise let it go and try very hard not to store that memory. Whatever you do, don’t stop going out to those kinds of lunch – if you did that it would just reinforce your ‘fear’ of his reaction, and similar situations would cause you anxiety – whoever your boss might be.

Hope that helps. Taking it as you described, it’s a classic situation of poor self-control and self-awareness from a boss.

Cirstie's reply:
He is very insecure, young (only just 30 - most of us are in our 40's and beyond) and I think he does worry that he is being left out. Will have to try and include him a bit more but still ensure we have our girls days. I really don't think it had anything to do with work load although he may have been a little insecure about being asked something he didn't know how to answer while we were out.

CLUES His Boss was a Woman!

2006-07-27T00:33:00.000-07:00

Do you know someone with IED? Intermittent Explosive Disorder? Yes it really exists - could it explain road-rage and other times when people lose it. Listen and find out.

CLUES And your greatest fear is?

2006-07-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

"The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you're born and never stops - until you get up to speak in public." Listen to the latest edition of CLUES to learn why this happens and what to do about it.

CLUES Why what you can't remember...

2006-07-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

Ever been caught offguard by an old memory? It can be a CLM! Listen to this edition of CLUES to find out more.

Having cleared minds not to resist change, how do you maintain a culture of consistency that allows the company to attain its long term goals? (Pat)

2006-06-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

Consistency is not just about behaviours but also about systems, processes and procedures. If people are open to the idea of change, doing something differently, but for example, the admin systems or supplier arrangements or customer interfaces don't support the new way, then it'll be almost impossible to keep your people engaged in the new direction.

The most significant contributor to culture is the way people actually behave not necessarily what the 'rules' require. So consistent approaches by managers, all managers from top to bottom, is essential. That's where strong leadership becomes essential, to not only model the way but be prepared to make tough decisions about managers and others who by their behaviours, sabotage change initiatives.

CLUES Passion Persistence Performance

2006-06-13T18:02:00.000-07:00

In this latest edition of CLUES, check out the role of passion at work - how it can drive us to success or failure.

CLUES Do your people love or hate their jobs?

2006-06-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

Listen to the latest edition of my e-zine and find out why some people leave their jobs and what you can do about it

CLUES Do you fear failure?

2006-05-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Does our fear of failure bring about the very thing we are afraid of? Listen to this issue of CLUES and learn how to deal with this fear more effectively.

CLUES Let's talk about Love!

2006-05-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

Listen to the latest edition of CLUES and learn about the amygdala in love and out of control!

CLUES - Why deadlines drive you crazy

2006-04-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

Why do deadlines drive you crazy? In this issue of CLUES, you'll learn how to deal with deadlines more effectively.

Reaction Management - What strategies can one put in place that makes them think about a situation before they have a negative reaction? (Lisa)

2006-04-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

It all starts with being consciously aware of yourself. You have to take the time to analyse what your triggers are, what happens to you physically when you react without thinking and what situations you've experienced that have left you regretting your actions. I know you're reading my fortnightly newsletter on this, CLUES, and in the next few weeks, I'll be covering more on this topic.

In the meantime, take a moment and write down all the things that really irritate you. Now write down what happened when you reacted first and thought second. Did you notice anything happening to your body - were you getting tense, tummy in knots, shaking? Your body will often tell you (if you're alert to it) that you're getting worked up long before your thinking brain clicks in. Learn what your signals and your triggers are, and the moment you sense it happening, take a slow deep breath and count to five. However instead of counting to five, count to 'I'm fine.' ie 'one, two, three, four, I'm fine'. Do this a few times if you can. This should start to slow down the adrenaline flow, start sending 'stand down' messages to your amygdala and give your thinking brain time to click in. But you have to do a lot of thinking and preparation now to train your brain for what you really want it to do before The Almond Effect (R) kicks in.

There'll be an e-book of with more explanations and more than 50 strategies to develop Reaction Management on my website www.anneriches.com in the next few weeks.

How does the brain react when I'm feeling angry or upset? Do I have any control over these responses? (Candy)

2006-04-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

You could be feeling angry or upset because, through your senses (ears, eyes etc), your amygdala has perceived a threat. So your limbic system triggers the distribution of adrenaline and hormones to literally prepare your body to fight off the threat or flight, run like crazy away from it. Your heart starts thumping to get the blood to the large muscles in your legs, you might even go pale as the blood streams there too. You might feel sick or you might need to run to the loo - because your body has suspended digestive functions to concentrate on the fight or flight necessity. You may shake, become tense, get a headache - all symptoms of your body's preparation for fight or flight.

If it is a real life threatening situation, then you'll be pleased all this is happening, it's life saving. Often however it is not - it's just that the amygdala has reacted without waiting for the neo-cortex - thinking or rational part of the brain) to let it know what the real situation is. And then we can just 'go off' and do or say something we regret and this is The Almond Effect.

You can train yourself to control these through a number of ways. The first and most important one is to develop strong self-awareness, to be able to instantly realise when your body is showing signs of stress (adrenaline flow etc) or you find yourself reacting emotionally not rationally. Then you can immediately deploy the strategy that most works for you to calm yourself down.

I am about 3 weeks away from completing an e-book and a CD on a more detailed look at how to control The Almond Effect. Email me if you want more details.

Does The Almond Effect vary depending on the generation? Do Y's differ in effect from X's or baby boomers? (Iven)

2006-04-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

Good question. Each generation's brains are essentially the same from a neuro-biological point of view. But the great mystery is why different brains react differently in the same situations? The amygdala sits within the limbic system in the brain. Memories and experiences are stored there. Can we say this is also the place that stores our values, our belief systems - possibly, but no-one knows for certain and there are heaps of theories. But these are what impact the various generations' reactions to the world.

The neuro-scientists can tell us that the neo-cortex in young people (teenagers) is still coming to full form whereas their amygdala is already functioning from a very early age. Maybe that's why they go off at things we don't think are that important - they don't have the ability to moderate their behaviour as well as adults.

And at the other extreme, baby boomers and seniors, have probably 'seen it all' and have taught themselves, either deliberately or by accident, to allow the thinking brain more time to click in when something stirs them up.

Underpinning our reactions are the neuro-patterns we have stored and that our amygdala identifies as a threat to life as we know it. Our experiences individually and in groups, at school, our social and work environments, the influence of the media, religion, world events and so on will all impact on what our amygdala perceives as life threatening. So yes I think there is a difference between generations, just as there are differences between individuals. It is a multi-layered response.

Why have you chosen an almond? (Ian)

2006-04-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

The part of the brain that is always on the look out for life threatening situations is the amygdala. It is the part of the brain that acts when it perceives a threat without waiting for the neo-cortex, the thinking part of the brain, to identify whether it's a real threat or not. Problem is, the amygdala often gets it wrong. And amygdala is Greek for almond. It also has the shape of an almond, so we get The Almond Effect.

What is The Almond Effect(R) (Ian)

2006-04-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

At its most basic, The Almond Effect is when your emotions drive you to speak or act without thinking about it first, you go off half-cocked and usually regret it!

Welcome to 'Ask Anne'

2006-03-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

I've created this blog so we can exchange ideas about The Almond Effect (R). I'll also try to answer your questions about how to retain great employees, great customers and/or great relationships. Look foward to hearing from you.