by James Brooke
The point is that we are at our most effective when we become aware of our inner cave dweller speaking. Being bulletproof means making the right choice when confronted with a situation – and making the right choice means calming and restraining our inner cave dweller.
As Steven Pinker puts it, our minds have evolved for survival, not for truth. In other words, seeing the truth of a situation may be helpful, but the main priority of our evolving minds is to view a situation in a way that has the greatest chance of keeping us alive. In times where communities and social structures were very much more straightforward, simply categorising people as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ may not have been pleasant, but it was a simple and crude way of keeping us alive. So, our instinct to survive encourages us to go for the lowest risk approach – that means thinking the worst and asking questions later. The more we can be aware of these instincts, the better we can make choices to bulletproof ourselves in today’s complex workplace.
Summary
The cave dweller reminds us that the legacy of our evolutionary past is always with us
Our instinctive responses evolved because they kept our ancestors alive – excellent back then, but not always so useful today
Bulletproof people know how to calm and quieten their inner cave dweller
The guide and the cave dweller
Case Study 1.1
Sean was under pressure. His department had to service another department down the corridor and they had not been delivering. But that was only part of the story – at least according to Sean. The other department had been unreasonable and incompetent, making requests for service that were late or incomplete. Sean had now been invited into a colleague’s office for some feedback. It was going to be an uncomfortable dressing down. But Sean, the consummate professional, knew how to handle it: be professional; take the feedback; agree a constructive way forward. In reality he did nothing of the sort. Sean explained that he had delivered some home truths to his colleague and … err … may have gone a little too far. But nothing that the guy didn’t deserve, you understand.
Metaphorically, Sean’s cave dweller had sensed attack, moved Sean out of the way and struck back. Literally, while Sean’s frontal cortex was thinking what to say, his limbic system and amygdala had sensed threat and struck.
The emotional and cognitive processing that we have inherited from our ancestors is not only ever-present, but also influences us more than we realise. That is why so often the reasoning parts of our mind can see the appropriate way to act in a certain situation but, nonetheless, almost before we realise it, we have done something quite different. But that is not all. The instinctive, emotional part of our minds is immensely powerful and the reasoning part of our minds is no match for it.
Imagine a football pitch. You get down on your knees and focus on two blades of grass. These two blades of grass represent the time in which humans have functioned in the modern commercial-industrial setting. Then you look back along the full length of the pitch, over yards and yards of grass. Imagine that all of these blades of grass represent the timeline stretching back to our earliest modern human ancestors. Now visualise almost 5,000 soccer pitches laid out beyond the end of this one. This is the length of time stretching right back to the earliest clump of neurons that functioned as a brain. Most of the instinctive, emotional processing part of our brain resides in the large, ancient limbic system. For humans, evolution added a frontal cortex, allowing us to reason, think rationally, make choices and participate in complex social interactions, alongside the limbic system and the amygdala, which process the more fundamental instinctive emotions that relate to survival.
To illustrate the constantly chafing, forever clashing relationship between these two parts of the mind, imagine that you are handcuffed to your inner cave dweller. You are your inner cave dweller’s guide. In some respects, your inner cave dweller is a strong and powerful resource to you. The problem is that he comes with a mind of his own. The guide knows where he’s supposed to be going and believes that he should be in charge. The cave dweller is big, strong and quick to react. The responsible, sensible guide is constantly trying to drag him back on track. The guide represents your ability to reason and make wise choices in social situations, typified by the frontal cortex, while the cave dweller represents the powerful, instinctive, emotional processing part of our mind.
This distinction matters, because to help us to become bulletproof it’s not enough for us simply to give advice to the guide. The crucial thing is to help the guide to manage the cave dweller. The ability to step back from our instinctive or automatic responses and to make choices, both in the way we think about things and the way we behave, is central to becoming psychologically bulletproof.
Summary
The cave dweller reminds us of the sheer power of our automatic responses to situations
The reasoning part of our mind is no match for our emotional mental processing
If we become more aware of our instinctive emotional processing, we can make more productive choices for today’s complex organisations
Our minds love to see patterns and stories in events
To look for meaning in events is human. If our ancestors saw an unexplained shape crouching behind a rock, it made sense to surmise pretty quickly that it could be a threatening animal and to take evasive action. Getting all of the facts before making a considered decision – or giving things the benefit of the doubt – was not a good survival strategy.
Take a look at the figure below. Most people see a white triangle overlaid on small black discs at each corner. Rotate one of the discs slightly and the triangle disappears. It was never there. Our minds instinctively piece together bigger meaning from smaller clues, seeking out consistent stories, patterns and themes from the things that we experience directly.
Let’s take another example. The photograph below, showing a UFO hovering above the coast of Cornwall in England, generated a lot of interest when it was released to the media by a team of UFO investigators. There’s no denying, even to us sceptics, that it’s pretty clearly the way we expect a UFO to look. However, if you introduce the image as a seagull to even the greatest UFO enthusiast they will not understand what all the fuss was about. Our minds make up the picture, depending on what we expect to see.
© Apex news and pictures
When something undesirable happens at work – you make a mistake, a prospective customer slams the door on you, your boss rubbishes a piece of work, colleagues cut you out of a project – your mind seeks to explain it by looking for a pattern or a theme. It seeks to make the incident mean something either about you or about the world in general. This is one of the ways in which the toxic effects of incidents become amplified. That relatively small incident affects you more than you feel it should, because the unconscious processing part of your mind is looking to give it greater meaning. It is asking whether this is part of a consistent story or theme for which you should be wary.
For our ancestors who faced the threat from behind the rock, it made sense to assume there was a theme: rocks similar to this one mean danger; when I see one, prepare for flight or fight mode. This might make for a stressed, nervous, pessimistic ancestor but one who was more likely to stay alive.
To be human is to seek to make sense of the things we observe or experience. We are natural meaning-makers. We could not function without this instinct, but it is also means that our minds readily start to ascribe meaning to the things that we experience in a way that can be unhelpful. What can seem like a relatively small and survivable incident at work triggers our ‘meaning-making’ processes. Typical reactions are:
• This means that I am not up to the job
• This means that I have been ‘found out’
• This means that things will keep on going wrong
• This means that people are generally mean and hostile towards me
These feelings start to contaminate other situations; the inc
ident has become toxic.
When analysing the facts and the story, it is key to avoid distorting the reality of the situation. ‘Distortion’ is the term that psychologists use when they refer to people interpreting an incident in a way that makes it mean more than it does. For example, if somebody does something that we interpret as hostile, it proves that either:
• I deserve or attract people’s hostility
• People are generally hostile
• I must have messed up again
On the other hand, it could simply be that the person is having a bad day, or tends to be that way with most people. The fact is that we simply don’t know. Any analysis beyond that risks becoming a thinking distortion. And because our inner cave dweller evolved in a hostile and dangerous environment, it made sense to be pessimistic and more acutely aware of risk. For this reason, negative thinking distortions are more common than positive ones.
Bulletproof people, however, will ask, ‘What am I making this mean?’ They’ll challenge their distortions and thinking errors by testing these against the real-world evidence. As we often put it, it is a case of separating out what actually happened in a situation (the facts) from what we make it mean (the story). This is the first step in decontaminating a toxic incident.
Summary
Our mind seeks out consistent themes and patterns because it tries to create meaning for us
As natural ‘meaning-makers’, we frequently make things mean more than they do
Being bulletproof means recognising your mind’s tendency to make an incident mean more than it does, and decontaminating the incident to prevent it becoming toxic
CHAPTER 2
CHANGING YOUR MINDSET
LEARNING HOW TO change your mindset and defuse distortions in your thinking is key in making yourself more bulletproof. The way we think about things affects the way we feel, which in turn affects what we do and the outcomes we achieve. This was the insight of the psychologist Aaron Beck, who recognised that many of the people he was treating for anxiety, stress and depression – the opposite of being bulletproof – seemed to be affected by distortions in their thinking. Beck felt that if he could encourage people to test out the validity of their thoughts – in much the same way that a scientist would interrogate the hard evidence – thinking distortions might be reduced and the disorders might improve. Beck’s approach yielded remarkably beneficial results and this has been borne out by numerous trials under clinical conditions. This is the essence of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Dr Amy Silver is a clinical psychologist who, in addition to her work with individuals in a clinical setting, has been adapting the principles of CBT to help leaders and managers to become more bulletproof in the workplace. By following that belief that all of us, at some stage, risk getting caught in distorted thinking – and that that is when our interpretation of the situation and our reactions to it are unhelpful – Dr Silver helps people in business to recognise common ways in which their thinking can become unhelpful. She often comes across people in business who are simply not functioning as effectively as they could be, because they have allowed their thinking about an incident to become distorted and this affects other aspects of their game. This distortion comes from only selecting the negative aspects of a situation and ignoring the positive, or vice versa. These thought distortions can happen at any time for us and can be so automatic that we don’t even have a chance to assess them for the truth. We find it intuitively hard to grasp that our thoughts might be wrong. But the truth is they can be – and a lot of the time. In varying degrees, this phenomenon affects everyone.
The principles of CBT are core to being bulletproof. If three-letter acronyms put you off, don’t worry – it’s the principles that matter, and the rudiments of these are easy to understand and master.
Summary
How we think about things affects the way we feel
The way we feel drives what we do and affects the outcomes we achieve – but not always for the better
Bulletproof people develop the habit of choosing how to think about an incident or situation
Putting it into practice
When something happens or somebody does something, we typically go on to assume that this incident or this person has made us feel a certain way:
• When he ignored me, it made me feel …
• When I made that mistake, it made me feel …
In reality an incident does not make us feel anything. The feeling that follows on from an incident is not inevitable. There needs to be a thought in between in order for the events that we experience to turn into feelings. And, as we’ve said, our thoughts are often distorted. We weave things into stories or we look for themes and consistencies that aren’t really there. So, an incident or event triggers a thought, which triggers an emotion, which affects our behaviour.
Case Study 2.1
Jane switched on her computer on Monday morning and discovered an email from a client rejecting her proposal [the incident]. Jane started to think, this just proves that I’m not good enough and I’ve been found out [the thought]. So she felt low and lacked confidence [the emotion]. In turn, this led to a certain type of behaviour. She was snappy and irritable with colleagues and family. As a result of how she processed the incident, she might end up being less inclined to approach her next proposal in a bold and creative way.
For a bulletproof version of Jane, the incident is identical but the way in which she thinks about it is not. Bulletproof Jane recognises the idea that ‘this proves that I’m not good enough’ is just that: it’s an idea, and not a fact. When she has these thoughts, she recognises that there may be thinking distortions at play. She distinguishes between facts and assumptions. She considers other possible explanations for what has happened: perhaps the client’s priorities changed; maybe it was all down to budget. She weighs the evidence for these alternative thoughts. The unhelpful effects of her emotions subside more quickly. She’s able to think more clearly and take more constructive action.
You can try this for yourself the next time something similar happens to you, by following these steps:
1. Take a breath and relax. Imagine yourself literally taking a step back from the incident and viewing it on a screen
2. Then ask yourself what thoughts you had in relation to the incident. What did you make it mean? How true are these thoughts? How much do you know and how much are you just guessing? What other interpretations could exist?
3. Imagine you could choose which thought would work best for you; try out the new thought and become aware of how you feel
4. If your mind starts to spring back to the old unhelpful thoughts, remind yourself that you are just trying out the new thought. What could be the harm in that?
Ultimately there are five elements that impact on any scenario:
• What is going on in the surroundings
• What you feel physically
• What you think
• How you feel emotionally
• What you do – in other words, your behaviour
These five elements interact to determine your experience. The very same situation can trigger different aspects of these five elements for different people. In other words, each person will experience the same situation in different ways. But if you want your experience of a situation to be different, you have learn to manage it. You need to change one, or more, of these five elements.
For example, you could change something about what’s going on around you – in other words, your surroundings. This might be something major, such as changing or moving to a different department, or it could be something as simple as changing your desk layout or your working routine.
You could change something physically by doing some simple breathing exercises – ensuring that you are breathing down to the lower part of the lungs and lowering your diaphragm – or going for a walk regularly. As we know, the physical and the psychological are closely related.
You
could challenge the way you think about something by questioning your thoughts. This essentially means trying to look at the validity and/or the usefulness of your thoughts by standing back from them and examining them dispassionately. It’s about trying to capture your thoughts and evaluate them. You can ask if they’re actually true; for example, do you mean ‘I can’t cope,’ or is the thought that most accurately describes the situation, ‘This is a really tricky situation that I’m struggling with, but I will get through this as I have other tricky situations’?
You could change something emotionally, with the view to becoming almost dispassionate about your own emotions so that they alone don’t decide what happens in your life. Rather than telling yourself ‘I can’t cope,’ which makes you feel anxious, you could take more of a dispassionate view. You could say: ‘Oh, look, there is that feeling of anxiety’ or ‘there goes that “I can’t cope” thought. Isn’t it interesting that it’s come up again?’ This is a much more practical and effective way to react than, ‘Oh, no, I must do something about that thought. This feeling is unbearable and so I must push against it.’ This process of stepping back from your emotions and becoming aware of them in a more dispassionate way fits with the Buddhist concept of ‘mindfulness’.
You could also change your behaviour. Perhaps you could be more assertive or be less assertive.
When people push against their emotions, those emotions tend to get stronger. Rather than battling against your emotions, with CBT you distance yourself from them and become a sort of scientist, reviewing your thoughts and emotions objectively. Sometimes the very process of distancing yourself from your thoughts and emotions can have a dramatic effect in calming the mind and gaining control over challenging situations.