The Elephant is always trying to protect you from threats to your conscious sense of self. When you’re dealing with an aggressive or contemptuous boss, it responds automatically and puts your body into flight-fight mode, by flooding your body with adrenal-cortisol stress hormones, even though the Rider knows it’s not going to punch the boss out or run away.
As I watch the Republicans defending Donald Trump during this impeachment process, I can see many of them trying to balance their need to maintain political power with their negative feelings about him. They focus on arguing about the process …
Up to this point all of my blogs have been about the relationship between our two minds in terms of the accepted role of managers as legitimate controllers of work and the people who work for them. My underlying assumption …
Our Two Minds Are Always At Work Recall my blog – “Our Two Minds At Work.” (June 16). Our Rider mind manages our conscious thought and speaking process but our huge, silent Elephant mind does most of the work of …
In a period of seemingly pervasive C.O.N.T.R.O.L. talk between people in the form of incivility reinforced by politicians acting badly on TV and strangers acting badly online, managers can have a positive effect. Employees’ Elephants do pay attention to their …
I have said earlier, that most of our thoughts, impressions and feelings are presented to us by an Elephant mind that’s reading our situation, people and their feelings more quickly than we can think. Through its mirror neuron system and …
At the level of neuropsychology, we are creatures who seek: (1) certainty, (2) opportunities to show our competence and influence over our situations, and (3) connections to others that are supportive and fair. These unspoken needs are intrinsically rewarding because …
Our lives are run by our brain – a huge information processor that sends one quadrillion instructions per second throughout a network of brain cells or neurons that are connected to each other. These connections – called synapses – are created in order to process 11,000,000 bits of incoming information per second.
Our Elephant mind is located in the middle of the brain around a set of organs that manage our emotions – called the limbic system. It evaluates and stores millions of bits of information per second of our sensory input (mostly visual).
Everybody grows up knowing “how to manage.” Down deep the word “manage” means to “be in control” of other people’s behavior.