”The price of greatness is responsibility.”- Winston Churchill

So many people go into business for themselves in an effort to have more control over their life. They have either made the decision that they need more financial freedom or just want a better life work balance. But being a successful business owner requires you to become a leader. And being a leader means being accountable.

Who holds you accountable? Your employees aren’t going to rat you out or hold your feet to the fire when you just “phone it in” and your family won’t know it. Who is going to make you do the things that you need to do even when you don’t want to do them? Who is going to stop you from doing the things that you shouldn’t be doing? The truth is there isn’t anyone who can. It is completely up to you. And you must have the discipline and guts to hold your self responsible.

We all know those people who are never to blame for anything that goes wrong in their business. It always seems to be something outside their control when things don’t seem to work out right. They are very good at making excuses. They did all they could and the results that they got where just inevitable. They say things like “Business is down for everyone!” or “You just can’t trust employees “When the cat’s away the mice will play”.

Making excuses and blaming your outcomes on inevitability or someone else is nothing more than excepting that you are a victim and powerless to be effective. And ineffective leaders do not have successful businesses.

If you really want your business to thrive then you must be aware of what is not working, acknowledge it and take ownership of it. Without ownership you cannot fix anything. If your employees aren’t performing the way you need them to, then what are you going to do differently to solve that problem. Is it a morale problem? Maybe it is just a lack of training.

Being accountable means seeking out solutions. If sales are down, have you stepped up your game? Are you doing anything differently? I have had business professionals who are in the service sector tell me that they refuse to discount their hourly rate. Well, in my world when you have excess inventory you do what you have to do to move it. Excess time is excess inventory. You don’t want to discount; fine then figure something else out. Whatever the issue, it is your job to seek the solution.

Being accountable means getting uncomfortable. You can’t sit on the sidelines and hope and wait for things to improve. Sometimes you are going to have to deal with conflict. Too often harried business owners assign all the important jobs to just one employee and then find themselves in a very precarious position when that employee turns toxic and removing them because next to impossible.

I was at a presentation once where the presenter was talking about business leaders who refuse to deal with problem employees. He said to the group “If you are one of those people who have to take Aim….Aim……Aim……Aim…..Aim….and then shoot; you really should reevaluate whether you belong in this role.” Hoping and waiting for a problem to fix itself is not an option.

When we fail to acknowledge reality and blame or make excuses for our problems we are acting like victims. It is only when we hold ourselves accountable by becoming aware of where we are, owning it and seeking solutions we become the true business leaders that we aspire too.

One Question

In the late thirteen century an Asian farmer was tending to his fields.  It was a beautiful day and the sky was clear; when off in the distance he heard the thunder of hoofs.  Given the beautiful day and that the sound was so far off he paid it no mind and continued his task at hand. 

A little while later he noticed that the sound had gotten louder and accompanying it now; was a dust cloud.  He recognized that something was headed his way and in a hurry.  But he wanted to get his current task done before the sunset so he kept at it and disregarded the cloud and sound.  Shortly after that Genghis Khan and his barbarians descended on the farmer and his family.  They killed him and his family, burned his farm to the ground and raped and pillaged the nearby village.

Had the farmer acted when he first heard the sound he could have saved his family and probably the village people.  Had he acted when he saw the cloud he could have at least saved his family.  Because he failed to act he lost everything, including his life.

Like the farmer many business owners are so overwhelmed with their task at hand they fail to see the warning signs that signal they are in trouble.  It is easy to feel besieged in business today.  There have been so many disruptions and distractions that if you aren’t feeling a little confused you probably aren’t paying attention!

But what can you do?  Tune up your perceptions or (and more likely) throw them out and get new ones.  If you think that doing business the same way you have always done business is a viable plan… then you will soon be out of business.  Change is hard but not doing it is no longer an option.  I’m sure you know that 80% of all new businesses fail in their first 3 years…. But did you know that 90% of all existing businesses decline 50% in value before they implement their exit strategy?  Can any of us afford a 50% decline in value these days?

Reexamine everything you do and ask yourself  just one question ”Is there a better way?”.

Finish Strong

Living With Your Lizard Brain – Essay #3 – What does Safe look like and what are the rules?

This is the final essay.  Here we learn what does it mean to really feel safe and what does safe look like.  In addition, Al gives us a few rules that will help us navigate our Lizard experiences a little more successfully.

SAFE – When your lizard sees no indicator of death, he relaxes and permits four visible behaviors. As I describe these behaviors, look at your own behavior and see if you can witness your safe lizard. Also take a look at how you feel when you observe others doing these things.

Play – Play is play.  Play is never competitive. Football is competitive but is really an analog for war.  Competition is all about winning and making the other into a looser.  Competition is all about fighting and making the other submit.  In children, play is often about learning how to do adult things. In adulthood play is about relaxing in groups.  We can only play when we feel safe.

Mate  - In primates and some higher mammals, mating is an extension of play. Mating is really not about making babies. In humans, the impulse to mate appears before babies are possible. The mating impulse occurs frequently throughout the month with no respect to fertile periods. And the mating impulse continues long after humans can no longer have children.  Mating is not sex.  We only mate when we feel safe

Nurture – Nurturing is the act of investing energy in the growth, health, and well being of another living being or yourself.  Nurturing is always focused on the other, on the nurtured-one. Nurturing is a decision to invest energy in the wellbeing of someone or thing other than ourselves.  Nurturing is also the ability to do this unconditionally with out an agenda. When we look at a plant we check it for water, for sunlight, etc., all the things it might need.  We never tell it to grow corn, as it is not a corn plant.   We expect the plant to be whatever it is designed to be.  We even encourage it.  When we are truly in nurturing mode we will encourage and facilitate people and things to become their best without feeling threatened.  We are safe 

Creative Work - Creative work is the kind of work you do even if you don’t get paid. It is fun, joyful, and attractive in its own right.  Hobbies, gardening, painting, and volunteer work are examples.  Most work is a kind of Submitting in the face of the Fighting demands of employers.  Many people find parts of their job are Creative Work and put up with the Submitting in order to get to do the fun stuff.  This is work that feels worthwhile.  We are very creative when we feel safe.

The Lizard jumps to negative conclusions

The first thing about the Lizard is that it is extremely quick to react. Since this part of the brain is over-engineered toward survival, it takes less than 1/5 second to go from fully relaxed to fully defensive. This is what we call REACTION.  It takes at least 20 minutes to recover and this is normal.  This quickness is the source of all the jumping to negative conclusions.  Apparently those creatures that erred on the negative side, as often as the positive, died out a long time ago. We are designed to go for the worst conclusion every time.  We’ve all experienced this when we wake up from a nightmare. We turn the lights on, look around the room, for danger. And nothing is there. But it takes a long time to calm down.  We are built this way. Trust, i.e. a sense of safety, is slow to build.  Doubt or fear is almost instantaneous. Reactivity is what keeps us alive!  We experience this as a flooding sensation all over our bodies. The chemical transmitter is adrenaline, which is squirted into our blood stream and in less than a half second hits the majority of cells in our body.  This is the stress reaction that prepares us for flight or fight (or freezing and submitting). It also shuts down our immune system, reduces the movement of our chests (breathing is interrupted), reduces the blood flow to our skin (we feel cold and get cold sweats), moves blood to our stomach (feel sick), dilates our eyes, and maybe empties our bladder and bowels. Strong stuff. Read the book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by David Ruenzel for more on stress reactions.  These chemicals take about 20 minutes at a minimum to be removed from the blood stream.   Thus it takes a fraction of a second to move to full emergency reaction or panic mode, and about 20 minutes to recover or relax no matter what.

Rule 1: When in doubt, the Lizard reacts and goes on the alert.

The Lizard protects the rest of the brain.  Interestingly, the Lizard reacts if the normal functions of other parts of the brain are threatened.  If the mid-brain’s need for community is threatened, the Lizard reacts in survival mode. While the mid-brain is producing the emotion of loneliness, the Lizard may initiate panic and fighting behavior to make sure that you are not left alone.  If the primate brain’s need for diversity or difference is threatened, the Lizard may avoid contact freeze or flee. If the primate brain’s autonomous behavior is threatened, the Lizard may begin submitting behavior.

Our brains resist and find painful many things that our society says are normal. For example, the John Wayne image of the independent, loner male is scary to our midbrain.  Human brains are designed to live in close community. Another example is that society tries to coerce conformity and agreement, while our cortexes are completely designed around diversity. Again society teaches obedience, while our cortex is designed around independent decision making. In a way, our Lizard’s reactions are often rational responses to a crazy society. The Lizard’s actions frequently appear anti-social when they are really simply reactive against particular dysfunctional types of social norms.  Frequently it is the hidden fear, the deep Lizard dynamic, that is buried in our frustrations. Mending or soothing these profound fears seems to be a successful strategy in resolving interpersonal frustrations.

Rule 2: Your Lizard is your best friend. Understand it.

The Lizard is kind of blind.  Located in the brain where it is, apparently it cannot see the outside world very well.  It seems to get glimpses only. That’s enough. Basically it looks up at the mid-brain, which looks at the Cortex, which is processing the images of the outside world.

Rule 3: The Lizard cannot tell the difference between reality and a vivid imagination.

Our cortex is often called an associational cortex. It looks at the outside world and then associates what it sees with vast memory resources in order to make sense of what it sees.  The Lizard looks in on this associational activity.  5% of experience is outside our bodies and 95% is found in the activity of our brains trying to make sense out of those experiences (our perceptions).  The Lizard reacts to the associations, the activities of the Cortex, and not to the reality of the world outside the brain.  What do you think a nightmare is? It is full of associational activity, of imagination.  During dreaming your brain has no reality to go by. Yet our Lizards believe all those imaginings are real and reacts.  When you wake up from a nightmare, you look around and see no danger.  But it takes twenty minutes minimum to calm your Lizard down. It takes very little for our Lizards to imagine that everyone is looking at you when you walk into a room and to react to that imagination. 

Whether we like it or not the Lizard is In-Charge.   You can see that waking up does not stop the Lizard s reaction. It has its own rules (20 minutes to settle down). You cannot choose to control it. You can cooperate with it, ally with it, but not control it. If you fight with it too hard, i.e. you say, It is safe when your Lizard is in survival mode, it will take over. It holds control of the blood flow to the cortex, and will cut that back or even off. You will pass out, faint, and drop to the floor. And your Lizard will be much happier. It got rid of its problem –your thinking. This state is often called a coma. Lizard is happy. Cortex is shut down.

Rule 4: Never tell anyone that there’s nothing to be frightened of.

If their Lizard is active, there is something to be frightened of, but it may be in their remembered or unremembered history.  You can see an example of this in a Panic Attack.  These occur when our survival mechanism creates its own nightmare and the feedback situation runs to the limit.  Kind of like when a microphone gets too close to the speakers in a public address system. The cortex is thinking thoughts that scare the Lizard. The Lizard starts to take action, such as shallow deeper breathing, and the cortex perceives the breathing as threatening. This further scares the Lizard. The extreme result of a panic attack is passing out, shutting down the cortex. Panic attacks are a great learning experience.  If you master them, you have learned how to give you Lizard its proper priority in your life it comes first.

Rule 5: Cooperate with your Lizard. It always wins.

The Lizard has full access to Memory.  All the stuff you don’t recall from your childhood is fully available to your Lizard. This makes sense. Would it be in the interest of your survival for your brain to forget dangerous, traumatic experiences?  In a way, the Lizard is responsible for Trauma Memory. On the one hand the experience you faced as a child was dangerous to your Lizard. On the other hand, letting the as-yet-undeveloped cortex look at these memories is dangerous to the Lizard. So the Lizard, actually a part called the amygdale, makes the decision and routes memories of the experience into Trauma Memory.  Thus your Lizard will react frequently to stuff you don’t know anything about. And Trauma Memory never goes away.

Rule 6: Your Lizard never forgets the past, and lives in the forever now. It is immediate, direct and simple.

The Lizard has no sense of time – This may seem odd but apparently the reptilian brain has no concept of time. It lives in the forever-now. Anything it perceives appears to be going on in the now. Thus when your cortex is recalling an event from the distant past, the Lizard perceives the event as going on currently and reacts in the same way to historical events as it does to current events.  Imagine a 5 year old coming down the stairs Christmas Eve and he sees his mother kissing Santa Clause.  Well, he is really quite traumatized and will probably hold on to that feeling somewhere his whole life.   Given that his cortex is still underdeveloped his perception of what is happening is going to be skewed.  Had this 5 year old boy been 16 at this time he would have know that Santa was Dad and everything was as it should be – safe.  Now this same 5 year old boy might not be sure why but he may get overly anxious as Christmas comes around each year.  He may also reach the conclusion that he just doesn’t like Christmas because of X, Y or Z but the real reason might be buried deep in his cortex in a place that only his Lizard can access! 

What to do about the Lizard?

The problem; As you can see your reptilian brain rapidly jumps to conclusions, can’t see clearly, reacts to things that our society says are normal, is fully aware of a lot of scary memories some of which you are unaware of, and reacts to long-gone events as actively as it does to current events.  Thus your all powerful-undefeatable Lizard will react passionately to small and seeming innocuous events (triggers) that remind you of long repeated past events. Probably 95% of a person’s emotional reaction is to their history and 5% is to the event that triggered it. Cure the 5% and you still leave the 95% untended-to.

So what do you do?   There is very little you can do.  But the one thing you must do is be aware of your Lizard’s place in your life and how it plays into your communications and interactions with others.  It is only within this awareness that you can begin to manage it.  When you are aware that your Lizard is becoming activated you should seek a safe place.  In addition, when you recognize that some one else’s Lizard has become engaged then you must try help them feel safe.  This can be done by taking time out from the conversation or make a graceful exit from the situation.  It is also helpful to try and locate the event that drove the Lizard’s engagement. 

In short, pay attention to how you interact and how you are being received.  LOOK FOR THE LIZARD!!!  And then deal with it accordingly.  This will ensure that you are acting not reacting.

Living With Your Lizard Brain – Essay #2 Unsafe – How do we respond to FEAR

Getting to know this reptilian brain is to make friends with a co-resident being. It has a mind of its own.  It is very powerful and it cannot be controlled.  It sees things following a fairly simple set of rules. You need to understand this reptilian brain “The Lizard” so you can understand many of the behaviors and reactions of yourself and others. The Lizard has two gears: SAFE and UNSAFE. 

UNSAFE

When your lizard or mine believes he is going to die, he kicks into one of four behaviors that you can easily see in yourself or others: flee, freeze, submit or fight. As I describe these behaviors, look at your own actions and those of people you know. Learn to recognize a reactive, panicky Lizard at a glance.

Flee – Fleeing is a most visible behavior that removes a person from a situation.  Reptiles scramble away across the rocks. Birds dart off. Bunnies hop off. The only survival skill for horses is running away. But humans, with their cortex full of learned, optional behaviors, are vastly more complex. When the reptilian brain says, Flee! the cortex comes up with 1001 ways to get away.

• Get in the car and drive off
• Go out to the garage
• Stay at work
• Stay at home
• Hide behind the newspaper
• Golf
• Sit at the computer
• An important engagement
• Change the subject
• Avoid or withdraw from the person
• Avoid or withdraw from the situation 

Have you ever taken your time coming home from work?  Or going to work?  If The Lizard expects some sort of discomfort (unsafe) at home or work it will try and minimize it’s time there.  Another example of The Lizard fleeing is more subtle.   Have you ever been having a difficult conversation with someone and you notice that they divert their attention by either looking away or becoming distracted by something else nearby.  This is The Lizard running away from the situation or conversation because it perceives it as unsafe.  Remember a Lizard, that is thinking for it self and is judging the situation to be a life or death condition, initiates each of these behaviors so it doesn’t help to blame a person who is fleeing. Their fleeing makes sense to their Lizard.  It also does not make any sense to go after, or pursue, a person who is fleeing. After all, their lizard already is running from imagine death. This is why stalking doesn’t work. Note: when someone pulls away from you, in panic, give them an assist. Help them get away. They will come back all the quicker.

Freeze – Freezing is the behavior of the deer in the headlights of a car. Freezing is becoming motionless invisible. There is a principle among lizards and mammals that if I am not moving, I am not seen, I am not there. Think of what reptiles do most of the time at the reptile house in the zoo. They do nothing. Actually, they are becoming invisible for the sake of survival.  Becoming motionless involves decreasing all bodily activities such as breathing.  When our lizard tells us to freeze, our cortex rushes through the 1001 ways to become invisible and tries one. In my office I watch people’s breathing. When they stop for a moment, I sense that their lizard has become panicky. I don’t know what about, but I tend to look around in what they or I were saying at the moment before the breathing stopped for a source of fear. 

When I teach about safety to a group at this point I usually ask for a volunteer to come up and be in front of people. I tell them they will stand up on a chair and do something safe but a bit silly. Then I wait for the volunteer to come forward. While I wait I count the number of people’sitting dead silent, usually the whole group. Then I say, Well, now I have 24 people freezing.  Freezing is the behavior of kids in a classroom when the teacher asks a particularly difficult question. No one moves. No one wants to call attention to himself or herself.  A very common form of freezing among males is practical joking. A practical joke is a piece of cruelty done to another person.  What makes this cruelty called freezing is the comment, Can’t you take a joke. I was just funning!  By those comments the cruel one is erasing their meanness. They are becoming invisible. 

Another extremely common form of freezing is asking questions.  Let’s say you have been thinking about going out to dinner all day. You have been imagining a particular restaurant and the wonderful way they serve food. When your partner arrives home do you say, “Let’s go to dinner tonight at so-and-so!”? No. What you say is “What do you want to do tonight?”.  That question is popped on the other person and all the thinking about dinner is invisible. Now if your partner is sensitive, they may guess you are up to something. They may start a tricky kind of guessing game.  Uh. Let’s see.  McDonalds? Oh, oh, no! (seeing the slight downcast look on your face) Well, how about a movie?  All the time they are trying to figure out what you want.  Of course the reason people are freezing, hiding their sadism, asking questions, is because from their lizard’s point of view, being direct means getting killed. Laying low is safer.  Lying, particularly the passive kind is a form of freezing. Active lying is saying that which is not so. Passive lying is not saying what is so.  To leave someone in a state of misunderstanding about something that you believe to be important to them.  People lie for one reason only: it is not safe to tell the truth.  More fully they lie because their lizard thinks they will be killed for telling the truth.  It doesn’t help to blame someone for freezing. Their freezing makes sense to their Lizard. Try to make them feel safe.  It is foolish to blame a person who lies.  If someone is lying to you, consider what you are doing to come across as a source of danger to his or her survival. Remember, it makes sense for them to tell a lie, it makes sense to their lizard. Another typical way of freezing is responding to a question by saying, I don’t know when what you really mean is I’m not saying.  It is a safe way to retreat.  I don’t know usually means don’t ask again and don’t get any closer.  I think the general goal is to recognize the panic behavior and work toward safety.

Submitting – Submitting is the behavior of giving in to another. You’ve probably seen puppies playfully fighting.  At a point, one rolls onto its back and doesn’t move. The other stands over the prone one for a bit, becomes bored and walks off. That rolling over with legs in the air is submitting in mammals.  By the way, don’t trust cats. One of their attack modes involves pulling a threat over on top of them, holding on with front legs and disemboweling the other with their hind legs.  Turn lizards, birds, or alligators over and they will become paralyzed for a bit.  Submitting is a survival mechanism of the old lizard brain.  Wolves do not fight other wolves to the death. Each member of the pack is too valuable to kill and they don’t want to loose even one. So, wolves fight to the submit gesture.  Grizzly bears fight standing up, clawing at each other. Suddenly one turns its head to the side and bares its throat. Both stop fighting and walk off.  In western national parks, the rangers give instructions that if a bear attacks, you should roll in a ball, protecting your stomach, and lay low. The bear will think you are submitting and consider you a non-threat almost every time.  But there is an additional thing to submitting. Recall the puppies fighting playfully.  When the winner walks off, it is often attacked from the rear by the previously prone looser.  This is a reminder that submitting is a two-step process: submit, and then revenge or attack later.  This second step is not so important among mammals, which have little memory.  Dogs submit nicely, most of the time. But the second step of revenge becomes a major problem in humans with all that memory.  Step two is often called resentment. And resentment builds. It is a primary destabilizing force in human relationships. When you see a human submitting, you probably can sense that there is trouble ahead sometime.  Let me illustrate this by an image.  Let’s say you are assigned as a hunter to kill a grizzly bear that has been causing a lot of trouble, killing cattle for example and is now threatening people at a remote camping area. So you take your gun, and go to the camping area. You look around. No bear.  So you put your gun on the camp table, pick up your bucket and go to the stream to fill it with water. Then the bear jumps out at you. So you form a ball, protect your vitals. The bear paws you around a little, maybe scratches you. You lay low. The bear gets bored and walks off. What happens when it is 100 yards away? You get up, get your gun and blow it away.  Now, why did the bear die? It has too little a brain.  It saw you submitting and said to it self, Oh heck, the hunter is submitting. So I am the winner.  Where are some berries to eat?  And thus the bear dies, all because of a small brain no cortex. If it had a bigger brain, it might have said something like this.   Oh heck, the hunter is submitting! No problem. Oh, wait a second. Hunters have a cortex. They’ll revenge me if I walk off. I guess I have to kill this one.  This way the bear lives. 

In the 1960’s about half of our population woke up to the idea that they had been submitting for years, centuries, and millennia. Women began expressing their resentment in powerful ways and painful ways that startled men.  Men, who had been used to women’s submission for centuries, now were finding themselves divorced.  Women simply do not see the need to submit anymore. For a while it was pretty easy for them to take their children, divorce their husband, and get paid for the whole thing.  If you wonder about this resentment thing, go listen in to discussion groups at any local women’s center.    

In the 1980’s the other half of our population began to show signs of resentment.   Men haven’t had a good deal in our culture any more than women. Men’s resentment is a bit harder to detect. The major symptoms are men giving up their traditional role as wage earner. Men started dropping out -quitting careers in industry and becoming cooks on dude ranches. Men became couch potatoes.  Men got depressed.  I recall many women who had divorced their husbands and who now were surprised when their husbands filed for bankruptcy. The women’s income was cut off.  They were shocked. 

Another slight variance between traditional male submission and female submission involves emotions. Women traditionally start serious submission around age 10 or 12 as the beauty ethic takes them over. Read the book, Reviving Ophelia, by Mary Pipher. This process of submission to looks takes a terrible toll on women.  Men traditionally start submitting around age 4-6, when they realize that the culture expects them to be tough and prepare for war. Boys are taught to hold back emotions just at the age when they should be learning how to appropriately express those emotions. They are also taught to compete and not to relate to others, just at the age when relationship skills are best learned. And these lessons are typically brought to the growing boy by the socializing parent, usually his mom. As adults, men are criticized for being unemotional by their wives, who are members of the gender that told them to not be emotional in the first place.  When watching a showing of Saving Private Ryan; the women in the theatre were observed in great numbers turning away from that long, horrible, first scene. The men were slowly nodding in recognition of the horror they had all their lives been preparing to have to face.  Men are brought up to believe they cannot escape that terror. Often women think they are entitled to avoid it. This makes for an enormous gender difference!  With all this submission, and related resentment, flowing around between the genders, there are lots of reasons for people to be angry at each other. 

There is another group in our culture that submits even more than men or women.  Childhood is almost one constant process of submission from birth up. Children are to be seen and no heard, etc. etc. And then when kids get to be teenagers, we adults are shocked at their rebellion and rage, and resentment.  It doesn’t help to blame a person who is submitting. Submitting makes sense to their Lizard. Find out what makes their reptilian brains so threatened. Work to make them feel safe. 

Fight – Heck, you know what fighting is.  So I won t expand on it.  But I just want to point out that most fighting is just a behavior of the lizard brain being defensive. I think that without threat, fighting would not occur.  It doesn’t help to blame a person who is fighting.  Fighting makes sense to their Lizard.  Find the threat and try and help to remove it.  Work to make them feel safe.

Living with Your Lizard Brain – Essay #1 – Meet Your Brain

In order to achieve anything you must feel safe. It is the most primitive and first condition of connection with others and becoming successful. Safety is an easily misunderstood concept.  People typically say they are safe when their actions show they are quite unsafe. And thus it is quite important for people to get a common understanding of what safety is and how it works.   So the following post will deal with the physical components of your brain and how they function.  While this is a very technical post (and probably boring for most of you); it is very important that you read the whole thing for a basic understanding of how your brain works.  In addition please don’t confuse safe with comfortable.  A person who believes they are comfortable can also feel unsafe and visa versa.

The Brain and the Problem of Safety

Safety starts with the way the human brain is built.  Brain psychologists’ call the three parts of the brain the tri-partate. These are three distinct major subsystems in our brains.  At the base of the brain, in the bottom of our skulls, starting in our upper neck and including the spinal cord, is a grouping of structures called the hindbrain. Sitting on top of that is curved group of structures called the mid-brain, or sometimes called the limbic system. And then capping the whole was the large forebrain the cortex. The names given these three brain sections came from comparative anatomy and seem to reflect evolution. The lower structure is common to all spinal corded animals. Reptiles have this section alone and it is commonly called the Reptilian Brain. All mammals have this reptilian brain, plus the curved addition of the Mammalian Brain. We humans have a reptilian brain, plus a mammalian brain, and the Primate Brain. The Reptilian brain is the basic system, to which is added a Mammalian addition in mammals, and finally a Primate addition in the higher animals. Thus the functionality of each piece is added on to that of the lower sections.

 The Primate Brain, or cortex, is like a giant computer hard drive. It is all about data  Storage. The vast majority of whatever happened to you is stored in your cortex.  What happened to you yesterday, what you dreamed of last night, what went on during final exams in High School? It is all in there. This is your memory. It is vast.  Memories are stored there even if you can’t recall, remember, and retrieve them at the moment. Also stored are memories of events from the very distant past. If you opened your eyes at the time what happened in the delivery room when your were born is there including the color of the walls. There appear to be memories from the womb stored there.  Our Memories are dated or aged.  Every night the Primate Brain sleeps. This is very critical. During the early part of your sleep, the indexes to memories are re-written. It is kind of like a librarian rebuilding the card indexes to the book files each night. By the way, if people don’t sleep, things get weird fast. Within just a couple of days without sleep, hallucinations, where you can’t tell the difference between the outside world and the inner world, will start.  When you are in the hospital one thing the staff is very interested in is your sleep.  They know they are giving you drugs that may interfere with sleep and they don’t want you hallucinating while they are responsible.   Memories are coded with a sense of when they happened with a kind of how long ago did this happen . One of the re-indexing operations is the changing of these dates. After one sleep, today’s memories become yesterday’s. Each day the distance of the memory from now becomes greater. This mechanism allows us to put memories in the past, to get some distance from the events. This is part of the system that helps us recover from trauma scary events.  A baby is born with the primate brain incompletely developed. Apparently the reptilian brain is fully functional some time before birth. The mammalian brain comes online within months of birth. But the cortex is still developing for years and becomes complete around age 12. The last capacity is the ability for abstract thinking. This skill has a significant effect on safety. A person needs abstract thinking in order to deal with memories of terror and to grasp that a memory or thought is not the same as the real event.  An example of this is the difference between how eight year olds and 14 year-olds handle horror movies. The younger kid likely will be somewhat frozen by the movie.  The events are real for him. No amount of telling him, It s just a movie, will work.  His brain is not ready for that concept. Now the older kid may enjoy the movie and tell you all about it.  The difference between the younger kid and the older is that the older one can hold ugly facts in their awareness, while the younger cannot handle this material without turning away. What happens to the younger kid’s memories? The design of the developing primate brain handles this. The horror memory is shunted into a section of memory called Trauma Memory. This is a place where ugly memories are stored, but do not need to be consciously remembered until the cortex completes its ability for abstract thinking. 

 Mammalian Addition, Limbic System – There are two interesting characteristics that relate to the mid-brain.  These functions are things that Humans all do and that Reptiles cannot.

 Emotions; Joy and Grief – Here is the location of the functions we call the emotions of Joy and Grief. Since the lower brain, the reptilian, controls the emotions of fear and anger, mammals have the entire full set of emotions. This might be part of the reason that children like mammals so much. Mammals are fully emotional, but don’t have the cortex’s capacity for lying or being sneaky.

 Reliable Community – The mammalian brain needs a reliable community to function. This is the need for living in herds, in packs, in villages.  Horses are trained easily; they even train themselves, by threatening dismissal for bad behavior. Mammals need membership like they need air. Going further, we can say that human hermits are not born. They are taught. Humans as well as mammals are designed to live in a community. The need for togetherness, the avoidance of aloneness is hard-wired. A hermit is a person who needs closeness; but whose experiences of closeness have been so bad, that they prefer loneliness, to what they remember about closeness.

 Reptilian Brain: The Brain Stem (The Lizard) - While the upper brain sections are fascinating, it is the lowest brain that is the seat of all the energy of safety. The following functions are common to all humans, mammals and reptiles.

Automatic Functions – First, the reptilian brain provides all the automatic functions: breathing, digestion, heart rate, etc. This part of the brain is so reliable that we enjoy sleep. Who keeps us going while we sleep? Our reptilian brain does 24 hours a day. It never sleeps.  All of us have pretty much the same design of reptilian brain as everyone else. The functions are pretty simple, but elegant, and of all things reliable. Here is something all of us can really trust.  This is the part that takes care of you when you sleep. Do you sleep? Do you like to just take a break after a strenuous period and just let it all go? For a moment, think how delicious sleep can be. Then think about who is keeping you alive during your nap? Who is keeping you from smothering yourself by accident? That incredibly reliable, yet simple, device called your old reptilian brain is fully in charge. Simple! An IQ of 1, but what a one!

 Survival - The second function of this lower brain is Survival. It makes sense that this important function would be in this reptilian part of the brain. Without it early evolutionary device that resides in all of us manages, not only our survival, but also the entire issue of safety that is so critical to success.  If you are not comfortable with the theory of evolution, let me just point out that God decided to put this function of Survival in all creatures.  It sits in the simplest common part of all our brains.  Here is how the Survival function works. About 50 times a second this part of the brain asks the question, Am I Safe? If the answer is Yes, we experience a set of actions related to safety. If the answer is No, then this reptilian part of the brain takes over in milliseconds, and we operate in an emergency mode. This is called the Panic or Not-Safe mode. It is the triumph of reaction over reflection. Well, it is this survival function, in the base of our brains that is the source of all reactivity. It is simple. We react automatically.  Life or Death .  This part of the brain is not designed for subtlety. It seems to only think of life or death. When it is relaxed, there is no sign of death coming from its point of view. Fear, to this part of the brain, is something like the idea that Godzilla is out there.  A little fear, anxiousness, means Godzilla is far off but is wandering around. Panic comes across as Godzilla is standing right behind and trying to grab you. This part of the brain is either in Safe mode or Panic mode, but never both.

Next month we will talk more about Safe and Unsafe mode so keep checking back or sign up to receive updates through your email.  But meanwhile thanks for stopping by and be sure and check us out at our website www.abacusandco.com for more small business services.  Don’t forget to check out our other blog for business book reviews – this months is Love and Profit by James A. Autry presented by Vince Palumbos.

Living with your Lizard Brain adapted from essays of Alfred Turtle

The next few posts are going to deal with how our brains process fear.  I have titled this group of essays “Living with Your Lizard Brain” and much of it has been taken from one of my favorite all time websites for relationships by Al Turtle.  I highly recommend this website for those of you who want to take your relationships to the next level.   You can access it here http://al.turtlecounseling.com/blog/Relationships. 

I have adapted these essays to just deal with the concept of Fear.  Al does a fabulous job at this so I didn’t have to do much adapting.  I just tried to steer it more towards my audience (small business people) and less about marriage.

6 Goal Setting Principals

 

1.    Write down your goal in positive terms not negative ones – Work for what you want, not for what you want to leave behind. Part of the reason why we write down and examine our goals is to create a set of instructions for our subconscious mind to carry out. Your subconscious mind is a very efficient tool, it can not determine right from wrong and it does not judge. It’s only function is to carry out its instructions. The more positive instructions you give it, the more positive results you will get.

 

2.    Use the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting format

·       Specific – A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions:

Who:      Who is involved?
What:     What do I want to accomplish?
Where:    Identify a location.
When:     Establish a time frame.
Which:    Identify requirements and constraints.
Why:      Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

 

·       Measurable – Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set. When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort required to reach your goal.  To determine if your goal is measurable, ask the How’s……How much? How many? How will I know when it is accomplished?

 

·       Attainable – When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.  You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps.

 

·       Realistic – To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress. A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labor of love.  Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal.

 

·       Timely and Tangible – A goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there’s no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 10 lbs, when do you want to lose it by? “Someday” won’t work. But if you anchor it within a timeframe, “by June 1st”, then you’ve set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal.  A goal is tangible when you can experience it with one of the senses, that is, taste, touch, smell, sight or hearing. When your goal is tangible you have a better chance of making it specific and measurable and thus attainable.

 

3.    Make it a habit! – 95% of what we do – we do automatically and only 5% of our actions are conscious.  We all have our own ‘rituals’ that we repeatedly do without having to think about it. When you get up in the morning and brush your teeth, you don’t concentrate on the movements that you make. When you tie your shoes, drive to work, open the door, you do it automatically.  We repeatedly do certain actions and after some time it becomes automatic. It becomes a habit and it becomes active in the right circumstances, without you having to think about it.  The easiest actions for us to take are the ones we perform out of habit.

 

4.    You have got to get UNCOMFORTABLE! – Comfort zone is the lifestyle you’re used to, the belief system you have, things you do on a daily basis. It’s your personal little world where you are safe and comfortable.  Sounds good, right?  It is, if you are completely satisfied with who you are and what you have.  If you want to become more, to achieve your most treasured goals, to fulfill your potential, then your comfort zone becomes your danger zone – your personal little prison.  Why? Because it holds you back!  You see, in your comfort zone you will receive the same results you’ve always got. There’s no room for any change. Staying in your safety place can be fatal to your personal growth. If you’re not learning new things, trying something new, the world will be simply passing you by.  Learning to step out of your comfort zone is essential for successful goal setting. Nothing significant was ever accomplished or created in comfort zone.

 

5.    Make it something you really desire! – If in the past you have failed to achieve your goal, it means only one thing- your desire was not strong enough. I can already hear some indignant protests that this statement has created. But it is true.  “Weak desire creates weak results.”  See, motivation is a combination of feelings, beliefs, desires and needs that drive an individual towards achieving certain goals. Consequently, lack of motivation can be either caused by lack of belief in oneself or by lack of desire, which stops you from moving forward towards your goal. If your desire is not strong enough, most likely you won’t achieve your goal, no matter how great your plan is.  If you don’t believe in yourself and your abilities – no matter how bad you want it; it isn’t going to happen.  From one hand you may want to accomplish your goal, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this right now. But from the other hand, you can’t find enough motivation to actually start working on achieving your goal.  You would love to open up your true potential, and live a full, joyful and fun-filled life, but previous setbacks, fears and negative beliefs are dragging you down.  If you are consciously procrastinating and then are mentally beating yourself up for it, stop! Because by doing it you are only de-motivating yourself more and decreasing your self-esteem. 

 

6.    Keep at it because it is a numbers game! – Failure is the other side of success. Your success largely depends on the number of attempts that you make. It is an interesting paradox.   Increased number of attempts leads to higher number of “errors” and “failures”. But at the same time it quadruples your chances to succeed.   If you want to achieve your goals you must be able to handle more failures.

 

Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you accomplish a goal you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of higher successes, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to achieve them.

 

So go ahead set some GOALS and then GO FOR IT!

 

Thanks for stopping by, leave some comments if you like, and be sure to check out our small business services and our book reviews (just click on the blog) at www.abacusandco.com.  Pam

Be Careful What you Wish For…..

We spend a lot of time discussing how to achieve our goals…. but what if the goal you have set is the wrong one.  How do you go about deciding what it is you really want?   What if you are on your way to achieving your nightmare?  You are on the right road but you are going to end up in the wrong town!

 

You may believe that you want to be very wealthy and that is your goal in life.  But if with that wealth you loose your freedom to come and go as you please or to spend time with family and friends would it be worth it?   What if your real goal was more personal freedom to come and go as you please?  That would probably change your goal to financial freedom instead of financial wealth.  Big difference.

 

You can achieve financial freedom a lot easier and quicker than financial wealth.  And you can get into a real personal hell if you actually achieve financial wealth without having the financial aptitude to manage it.  Look at all of those people who crash and burn after winning millions of dollars over night.

 

Another deception that lies within goal setting is what I call “why and who’s it for”.  One of my closest friends told me of a recent revelation that they had become a lawyer in hopes that it would impress their father.  It didn’t work; he wasn’t impressed and my friend never really wanted to be a lawyer.  Another person I know went into business just to discover that it wasn’t a business that they wanted but a less demanding job.  Boy did they get that one wrong.

 

So before you head off into 2009 with your goals all laid out.  Take a moment and really think about what it will look like once you achieve it.  What is it that you really want?  What is it that your life or business needs to do to achieve that goal and is it worth it?  Setting goals is very important – if you are going to struggle to achieve something make sure it is worth it!

 

 “When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing — then we truly live life.”  Greg Anderson

 

Thanks for stopping by; feel free to leave a comment if you want or stop by our website and see our other business services, workshops and business blog that we are doing at www.abacusandco.com.  That’s it for now; have a safe and Happy Holiday – Pam Bauer

Accountability

Accountability walks hand in hand with discipline.  You will not be successful without it.  There is a saying and it goes something like this “There is no assurance that awareness and discipline will lead to success, but not being so inclined nearly guarantees failure.” 

 

So to further illustrate my point I have taken some liberties with the transient process and have come up with the following:

If

Awareness + Discipline = Accountability

And

Accountability = Success

Therefore

Awareness + Discipline = Success

 

In short, if you are aware of what needs to be done and you have developed the appropriate discipline you will have no problem holding your self accountable for the outcome.  And when you hold your self accountable your esteem for your self is also improved.  Therefore, awareness and discipline will improve your esteem.  It doesn’t matter which identity you use (ie self, brand or company) the theory still holds true.

 

A favorite book of mine written by David Maister is “Strategy & The Fat Smoker”; I highly recommend it.  In this book David describes a letter he has a business owner write all of his employees:

 

Dear Fellow Employee,

 

I invite you to submit to me your resignation.  Let me first say that you do not have to; it is not obligatory.  And, should you choose not to do so, I assure you there will be no punitive consequences.

 

However, if you do submit your resignation and I choose not to accept it, I guarantee a raise on the spot. 

 

Mind you, if you submit your resignation and I do accept it, your resignation would be considered to have been tendered voluntarily, and as such you will not be entitled to collect unemployment insurance or any severance pay.

 

Have a wonderful day!

 

Your Boss

 

Imagine getting that letter.  What would you do?  Imagine sending that letter.   There would have to be awareness (how am I doing here) and discipline (to act on that information) with immediate accountability (submit resignation or confident I will be retained).

 

If you have some thought on this post please leave some feedback in the comments section.  In addition, please visit our website at www.abacusandco.com to check out our many small business services and workshops.

 

Well that’s it for now thanks for stopping by – Pam