We now know our emotional brains run our lives
We knew this for a long time.
Socrates, Hindu philosophers, Plato/Aristotle, _____, Jefferson[?]
In the 1970s psychologists Kahnemann and Teversky applied scientific study to the decision-making.
Now we have modern neuroscience and neuropsychology, and behavioral finance.
Then Emotional Intelligence
John Gottman
We have known this for along time. For example, I am pretty smart. I have a math degree from MIT. I have a pile of certificates and credentials documenting that I am smart.
But I do not run a large organization or have a private jet. Part of that is luck, especially regarding the private jet. But the part of that which is not luck has little to do with smart, but about heart. By heart I don’t just mean compassion. I also mean street smarts and people smarts. EQ.
This is not a talk on neuroscience or decision psychology. We could fill a weekend seminar on those subjects. I am not an expert in them. If you are, I apologize. Some of what I am going to say is not even precisely accurate. It is an approximation, a mental model, a framework. But I claim it is accurate enough to be useful. Incredibly useful.
The two brains and their conversations.
Cognitive brain holds concepts ideas and symbols. Future. Past. Me. These are all thoughts. Thoughts are incredibly useful. And they get us into trouble.
Emotional intuitive brain is here and now. It is not cognitive or symbolic. It cannot tell one person from another who makes it feel the same way. It runs on pattern recognition and conditioning. It listens to the thoughts in the cognitive brain and reacts to them too. My emotional brain is not actually in my heart, as far as we know. But to my cognitive brain, which holds all these concepts, everything is somewhere down there. There is a real basis for this. The rest of our brain extends into our bodies. Our emotions and intuitions come it. They are associated with our somatics, our posture and tone. To our thinking brain it is all somewhere down there in our body.
Here is the key part: Our emotional brains unconsciously drive our body language, including and especially our facial expressions. Also our tone of voice, our posture.
And our emotional brains pick up all these micro-signals. They are having their own separate conversation. All the time.
How often have you been in a conversation where there seemed to be a dynamic that was separate from the topics being discussed? How many of you have observed that in a conversation between two people? They are talking about one thing, but there is clearly something else going on.
Yes all the time. Even now? Yep. Here is a demonstration.
What if I were giving a lecture and you were sitting in the audience. Pretty low level of emotional engagement. So that emotional conversation isn’t very active. And yet a good talk comes form emotional connection with the audience.
Ok so lets change things. What if the speaker suddenly picked you. What if they addressed you directly? What if they asked you to sing the national anthem (or sing and dance like Shakira on that World Cup Video]? All your faces react.
With a real audience – pick on a person. Their face reacts. I react to that with empathy and humor. What message did I send? That I care about your expeirence and that makes you safer with me. Because I care I’m less likely to do something embarrassing.
So what does this mean for my life? It means when a conversation matters, either because the subject does or the person does, our emotional brains are in charge. My thinking brain can’t even follow everything that happens, because it is too fast, too subtle, too subliminal, too unconscious.
So what does this really mean? It means if I look back at the most important conversations of my life, “I,” my thinking self, wasn’t even in them. When I am talking to my spouse, or my boss, or my teenage child, or that important client, or that colleague who gets under my skin, my emotional brain in in charge. My thinking brain, the one I think in in charge, can’t even follow what is happening.
Quote Ogilvy partner here?
• Riders and elephants
• Head office and press office
• Economists 20 years, psychologists 40 years, craftsmen in advertising and marketing, 60 to 70 years.
Influence. So what does happen? Emotional connection. If we establish empathic connection, we influence each other.
Ok, so this is all pretty humbling. What can we do?
Good news: we do not have to think about it much more. Whew. That’s a relief. We don’t have to think about it because we cannot think through the red brain conversation. Where do we follow this conversation? In our heart.
Example of Jim Flick. Most golf books describe the results of a smooth, relaxed, confident swing, not the causes. And ironically, thinking about all of those resulting details pretty reliably keeps us from having a smooth, relaxed, confident swing. We are going to develop our feel for the golf club, and a swing that feels good.
By attending to what I practice, I can become aware of my skill level. I can practice new skills. It turns out this is actually quite easy and a little bit of the right practice quickly makes a big difference.
The sign in the Arthur Murray studio (the learning model)
Unconsciously incompetent
Consciously incompetent
Consciously competent
Unconsciously competent
So we start noticing what we are missing, by bringing our awareness to our feelings, because that is where we get the emotional conversation. The heart is our receiver-transmitter for that frequency.
Sorry, what exactly am I supposed to practice again?
- Notice my emotional reactions, including my physical reactions (somatics) and impulses, whether I act them out or suppress them. Notice my behaviors, both my conscious choices and my unconscious (habitual and conditioned) responses.
- Notice my thoughts as thoughts. Our thoughts mix actual observations with assumptions and guesses. We organize them into stories.
- Notice the dynamic in conversations. A good start is to assess each response as towards, away, or against. Notice how I react in this dynamic.
This practice is similar to beginning dance lessons. First I notice my feet and what they are doing. Then I start practicing doing particular, intentional things with my feet.
Practicing the emotional conversation.
- Get curious about others. Look to empathize. Look past the words to the emotional content and the behavior.
- Allow myself to be more fully known. Share my intentions and my emotional reactions to what happens.
- Make empathic connection. What does it look like? Turn on your television. Pretty much every show that you really like, that engages you, will have empathic connection at the core of almost every dialog.
What happens with practice
These practices force us to discover our own hearts as well as our emotional connection with each other. Which brings us to JoHari’s Window. Through dialog I allow myself to become known at this level, and allow myself to know the other, and in that discover things about my own emotional self which were not known to me.
And that takes vulnerability and courage. Vulnerability can have more than one meaning. It can mean being unguarded, exposed. This is not the same as being weak or little. It means putting my guard down, dropping my armor, opening my kimono, extending an unarmed hand for a handshake. This vulnerability requires strength and confidence.
It is essential, because we cannot make emotional connection without being open to it. Being unguarded is essential to being open, which is essential to emotional connection which is essential for influence. For emotional connection to happen, I have to be available for it. I have to show up and be open to the other.
When Brene Brown studied vulnerability, she discovered a quality she called wholeheartedness. The word courage comes from the word heart. This is because it does not take courage if we are not afraid. It does not take courage if we are foolishly reckless and unwise. It takes courage when we are afraid and understand what is at stake, but care enough about something to step forward anyways. Courage comes from caring, from passion and drive and commitment.
And so this red brain conversation is not about flowers and ribbons and hugs, although it can be. This not about soft and nice, although it can be. Emotional connection is bigger than that. Winston Churchill, George Patton, Ronald Reagan, Vince Lombardi, even Hitler all made emotional connections, both one-to-one and with audiences.
By attending to what I practice, I can become aware of my skill level. I can practice new skills. Eventually I can be effortless and gracefully skilled.
Then I can live from the heart with effortless grace. And I can connect with others from the heart with effortless grace.
Then my world will open like a flower in bloom, like an oyster, and all its riches will become available to me.
Other items to add into the framework:
Intention. My emotional brain carries my reactions to everything that happens. It also carries my values and my intentions for whatever context I walk into.
Power. (Back to that private jet and corner office). Jeff Pfeffer described 5 sources of power. One is influence. It is often the one we can best control in any given moment. Influence comes from emotional connection.
Elephants and Economics 