Your brain, just like mine, is wired to survive – this is good and not so good. The good is fairly obvious, the not so good not so much. Let me attempt to help.
Your brain, in order to survive, naturally “rushes to judge.” And, your brain, when it senses a threat to its survival as a result of its rush to judgement, tends to freeze. This worked back in the day when the threat was a saber tooth tiger. Playing dead, oftentimes, kept us alive.
Today, in the world of work, there are few such threats. Yet we act as if the leader, the CEO, the boss, or the big guy/gal could take us out with one swipe of their paw. So, we hold back.Yes, we hold back. We, in fact, habitually hold back. We do not believe what the Bible says about truth. The Bible tells us over and over that the truth will set us free. Running around the hallways of corporate America you would come to believe a quite different reality – the truth will get you killed. So, humans throughout the world of work attempt to play at their peak without letting down their guard. This may keep ’em alive but it deadens high performers and dampens their performance. Why? Because high performers play aggressive. The productive aggressor is NOT guarded…
Yesterday, in a really good company that is the envy of many and deservedly so, I witnessed a number of high performers overly wired for survival. Their speech and actions were guarded. I shook a few of them out of their frozen state. A few, not so much.
If you want to perform at your best, in work and life, you are going to have to conquer this kinda fear. High performers understand that their brain is their number one resource and they have to rewire it for excellence or be limited to repeat the patterns that their evolutionary gene pool has passed on.
“The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other supperstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty,will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.”
Taken from The Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray.
Are you holding back?
Do you tell the truth? Are you hearing the truth? Do you seek the truth? Are you training your brain the discipline of reasoning? Are you freezing when speaking the truth is right in front of you? Are you freezing when someone is trying to tell you the truth about your performance?
Slow down. Think. Reflect. Write. And, tell me more. Tell me more, my friend. The untrained brain tells its master there isn’t the time. The master, just the opposite…
BUILT TO LEAD 