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.
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.
The number one problem that change agents have in leading organizational change is the resistance from middle and senior managers and professionals. They don’t respond well to change programs. Potential change threatens their self-esteem. Their (1) Value – in classic …