Meet Your Mind
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To feel good at work, start inside with your mind. Understanding our minds – why we act and think the way we do – leads us to be more calm, focused, agile and optimistic. With that foundation, we can more effectively lead others, lead teams and lead organizations.
In this 5-part series, Meet Your Mind, we explore different facets of the mind — what it is, how we experience it, and how to better manage it. With this knowledge, we can uncover the mind’s often mysterious ways and befriend a powerful ally in the journey to be our best selves.
1. The Mind vs. The Brain
The mind and the brain are not the same thing. Your brain is the 85 billion neurons between your ears, as well as the 40 million neurons around your heart and 100 million neurons in your gut. In contrast, your mind is the totality of your experience of being you— cognitively, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When we speak about the brain, we refer to the physical collection of neurons in our heads and bodies. When we speak about the mind, we refer to the bigger perspective of being ourselves.
Neuroscientists have found that by training our mind, we can change our brain. Physiologically, we can change the structure of our brain by training our mind. When this happens, we can become more focused, kinder, more patient, or any other qualities that we train for. Simply put, what we do is what the brain becomes. Focus for ten minutes every day for two weeks, and our prefrontal cortex— a part of our brain that contributes to focused attention— is strengthened. The brain is taking shape according to how we use it. Scientists and researchers call this neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is great news for all of us. It means that we’re not limited by the faculties and aptitudes we’ve already developed. On the contrary, we can keep learning and growing and can effectively rewire our brain throughout our entire lives. And as leaders, we can learn to better manage our mind.
But here is an important caveat for neuroplasticity. Just because our brain is constantly changing doesn’t mean that it’s automatically changing in ways that are helpful to us. In fact, in our distracted work environments, we tend to rewire our brain to be more distracted. If those sentences make you think about your smartphone or meeting schedule, you’re on to something. If we’re constantly asking our brain to shift from one task to another, our brain’s ability to focus on a single task will diminish. And if we allow ourselves to be constantly impatient and not particularly kind to others, these two characteristics can become the default operations of our brain.
In this sense, we get the brain we get based on how we use it. Which means we should all place greater value on creating and managing our mind in ways that are beneficial to us as leaders and the people we lead.
Excerpt from: The Mind of the Leader, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, HBR Press, 2018.
2. You Do Not Control Your Mind
Well, said another way, you probably don’t control your mind as much as you think. We all have the powerful illusion that we are consciously in charge of our actions and behavior at all times. But in fact, scientists estimate that 45% of our everyday behaviors are driven by reactions below the surface of our conscious awareness. This may sound like bad news, but it’s necessary and extremely valuable. Imagine trying to drive a car if you consciously had to remind yourself to push the pedal to speed up or ask your hands to move when you needed to turn the wheel. You’d be overwhelmed—and you probably wouldn’t get very far. In certain circumstances, these autopilot actions, reactions, and behaviors are vital. These unconscious processes allow you to perform tasks without having to think about them. But not all of your autopilot actions and behaviors are useful in leading yourself or others.
As leaders, we impact the people we lead. They pick up on every subtle cue we send, whether we send it consciously or unconsciously. And many of the cues we send can be discouraging, distancing, or confusing. This is not necessarily due to bad intentions, but rather because the behaviors, actions, or reactions happen while we’re operating on autopilot. Therefore, gaining greater awareness of our subtle actions and behaviors, and eliminating autopilot behaviors that are detrimental can be highly beneficial.
Fortunately for all of us, our awareness can be enhanced. We can change the ratio of our conscious to unconsciousness behaviors, which can make the difference between making good or bad decisions. By expanding our awareness of what’s happening in the landscape of our mind from moment to moment, we can pause in the moment, make more conscious choices, and take more deliberate actions. These are powerful skills to have as a leader.
Excerpt from: The Mind of the Leader, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, HBR Press, 2018.
3. Your Mind Creates Your Reality
Consider the last time you felt like you led a meeting in which everyone was perfectly aligned, only to later find out that some participants left feeling misunderstood, unheard and resentful. Why was your reality different than others’ reality? In short, because our minds influence how we see the world, and our lived experiences don’t always line up with one another’s.
Neurologically, this is not a flaw but an important evolutionary adaptation. “We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we’re constantly bombarded with,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at SUNY. As such, our brains are set up to predict as much as possible, based on prior experiences. Often what we experience as consciousness is primarily a prediction, not the real-time feed. But it feels real, so we assign truths to these thoughts and experiences, again and again and again, until they become beliefs. On top of this, “when the brain is primed by a certain belief to look for something, it shuts down competing neural networks, so you actually have a hard time seeing evidence to the contrary of an already existing belief.” (J. Vilhauer)
If what we perceive to be reality isn’t the same as how others perceive the situation, we’re apt to find ourselves in conflict. Fortunately, if we find the courage to question our behaviors and beliefs, our chances of successful collaboration with others can improve.
One way to begin is to practice being mindfully aware in the present moment. Neurologically, when we train in mindfulness, we are triggering a shift in cognitive control to our frontal brain regions. This change in neurological wiring helps us to perceive situations and to make decisions more from our conscious mind, avoiding some emotional traps and unconscious biases. Operating more from our prefrontal cortex also enhances our executive function, the control center for our thoughts, words, and actions.
Your mind creates your reality, and your thoughts and reactions to any event are a choice. With this awareness, you can begin to better utilize life situations as moments of growth and freedom and to respond with greater wisdom and compassion.
4. You Are Not Rational
We all want to believe that we are rational beings, but we’re not. We think we react rationally, but we don’t. And we expect people on our teams to behave and react rationally, but they don’t either. That’s not how any of us are wired. In truth, we make choices based on emotions and rationalize them afterward.
Emotions steer much of our behavior and daily decision-making, often in unconscious ways. For example, across twenty-six countries, the amount of sunshine recorded on a given day and the stock market performance on that day are positively correlated. If we were truly rational beings, sunshine would not impact how financial markets operate. But it does.
So, what’s going on? It’s the brain taking a shortcut – in psychology, this is called a heuristic – so it can make decisions quickly and efficiently. In this case, the affect heuristic is at play meaning your brain is relying on the way that you feel (your affect) toward a particular stimulus or situation to influence the decisions you make. Sometimes this works out well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
As leaders, we need to become skillful at understanding and managing emotions. Once we learn to connect with emotions—starting with our own— then we have the potential to become truly inspiring and engaging to those we lead.
The first step is to be aware of when and how we become triggered and to know what’s going on inside. The prefrontal cortex is our rational brain. We use it to imagine, to set goals, to plan, to problem solve, to keep ourselves focused on a task, and to manage our emotions. The limbic system, on the other hand, is our emotional brain. It’s impulsive and works much faster than our rational brain. When someone behaves rudely, you may instantly feel like shouting at them – that’s the limbic system being activated. But if you keep your composure, it means that your prefrontal cortex has intervened.
Take a moment to consider your emotional hot buttons—situations in which you know you tend to react instead of responding. Knowing your triggers in advance can help you to remain more in the moment.
The second step is simply to stop. Take a moment to collect your thoughts. Take a breath. Notice the urge to react and take a few more breaths. Be present with what you are experiencing, and see if by focusing on breathing, you are able to calm down and clear your mind.
The third step is to choose how you want to respond. If you are able to respond from a place of compassion, that’s ideal. If you recognize that you may still be at risk of reactivity versus responsivity, a good option might be to pause the conversation and suggest following up at another time. The pause button is good to keep close at hand when doing hard things.
5. You Are Not Your Thoughts
It’s incredible to think that the average brain processes between 6,000 and 70,000 thoughts per day. These thoughts are mostly random, repetitive, and sometimes intrusive. Unfortunately, our inner monologue is predominantly negative. Earlier on, this helped us to survive as a species. Paying attention to threatening, bad or dangerous things increased our chances to escape danger and live. But we no longer need this hypervigilance, nor does it serve us well. If we don’t make conscious efforts to counter these tendencies, we spend our lives battling a highly critical inner voice which puts our mental well-being at risk.
Have you ever had a bad thought? Does that make you a bad person? Of course not. But when you identify with your thoughts, you become their victim. This is especially true if you tend to be critical of yourself. Then every mistake can mean that you’re “stupid,” “lazy,” “incompetent,” or a “failure.” To avoid being victimized, it’s important not to believe all your thoughts.
However, it is one thing to agree that thoughts are not the true essence of who you are. It is another challenge to tame their ceaseless swirling around in your head. The first step you can take is to understand that you can’t stop your thoughts. The mind is always going to think. But it is possible to change what you do with your thinking by expanding your capacity for mindful awareness.
For many of us, a good starting point is to practice focusing our attention on the body. Intentional breathing is known to counter the effects of negative thinking by regulating the autonomic nervous system. When our body experiences a shift from fight-or-flight to relaxation, a more open and positive state of mind becomes possible.
As we develop the awareness of our inner reality – emotions and thoughts – we can create a healthy and realistic distance from our mental activity. Instead of trying to fight with our thoughts to make them go away, we start to observe them as fleeting events that have no real substance or importance. Like clouds in the sky, they come and go. By seeing our thoughts this way, we discharge some of the impact they have on us.
This understanding helps us to avoid our compulsive reactions, such as harsh self-criticism in moments of stress, and to replace them with more useful behaviors, for example self-kindness. We also learn not to judge ourselves for having negative or unhelpful thoughts, but to accept it as part of being human.
Excerpt from: The Mind of the Leader, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, HBR Press, 2018.
