Getting defensive

Withdrawing from some people

Explaining to people how they’re wrong

Getting agree when people cancel on me

Basically being someone other than I wanted to be with others.

I was pretty relieved when I discovered everyone has their own version of this going on.

Although probably a far less sarcastic version.

The brain is always measuring our level of safety within the tribe

Via a part of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (mostly) it constantly scans for risk of loss or opportunity to gain hierarchy and connection.

Business leaders tend to wear ‘hard work’ as a badge of honour. Arriving first, leaving last and then continuing to work into the evening often stay up til midnight and beyond.

They do this despite the fact that they aren’t being paid to work hard. They are being paid to keep the business in high performance mode and the best way to do that is to keep themselves in high performance mode. A tired and overwhelmed leader will soon start making decisions based on their own limited bandwidth and will quickly create a tired and overwhelm business. I help my clients to find and protect their own high performance mode so that they can better support the business to locate and maintain high performance mode.

There’s the peers path, this one seems safe and familiar. It’s full of the me too’s of shared experience. But often me too’s are of shared suffering of disconnected relationships, illness, back pain and what’s wrong with people who don’t think like us.

There’s the praise path, this path is often intoxicating as first we acted and got applause. Now we act for the applause and find ourselves pandering to it. It controls our choices and so direction. We are blown where ever the wind takes us and physically suffer, first only when the applause is silent then always as we see the difference between acceptance and entertainment.