Leading With Your Lizard Brain

I have always been fascinated by the human brain. There is so much pop psychology floated around by amateurs that we rarely get an honest glimpse into how it works. We hear so much about how our brains are wired, but that is gross oversimplification. If the truth were known, even the experts have difficulty exploring and understanding this organ. Functionally, parts of our brain have remained prehistoric. An excellent article by Christine Comaford in Forbes called Hijack! How Your Brain Blocks Performance goes into exciting detail explaining in lay terms how the brain can affect action. The reptilian region, also called our lizard brain, controls instinct and is the area that responds to stimulus with a focus on survival. She uses the terms Critter Brain and Smart State to separate the study of response by instinct and response by choice. She ends the article with the promise of a follow-up on keeping people in their Smart State… I can’t wait!

Last year I wrote an article Why Networking Doesn’t Work in which I explored social interaction as it is impacted by the part of the lizard brain called the amygdala. These are two almond shaped regions at the base of the brain that fire up the fMRI with color in brain scans investigating fear response. In theory, the amygdala not only plays a key role in fear responses it has an important impact on our social interactions and social behavior. Leadership training focuses on appealing to the whole brain of employees, but often we appeal to their lizard brain. Worse yet, in stimulus-response mode our leadership can actually originate in our lizard brains. It is important to understand when and how this occurs… beginning with the assumption that it isn’t easy because everyone is different.

Embrace your lizard – It doesn’t help to ignore primitive forces that control us. We can rise above it and teach ourselves to override actions that are generated from there, but we probably should not… or could not… completely block them out. This also helps us to consider higher functions that are not biologically instinctive: Is knee jerk human jealousy an instinct? Concentrating on the cause and effect of our thoughts is a good way to control our actions.

Recognize lizardly actions – Just because these are reflex actions within ourselves and others doesn’t make them invisible. They go far beyond the animal fight, flight or freeze instinct. In the workplace, management using fear of reprisals is basically the least effective way to lead others. Even if leaders have the best interest of others in mind, the response mechanism of others may resort to basic survival responses if there is perceived loss of employment, compensation, friends or other security needs.

Listen to the lizard – There is an inner voice that sometimes raises its voice to us. Stop! Slow Down! Back off! Sometimes it is a more subtle cry for survival and creates the need to compromise rather than to lose. Recognizing this in ourselves is much harder than identifying it in others. Unexpected or uncontrolled actions without intentional provocation signals trouble in interpersonal relationships. Once this behavior is identified, modification can be targeted to the cause rather than the result.  

Fight the lizard with your lizard – The automatic part of our brain thankfully controls breathing so that we don’t have to waste conscious thought processes to do it. Anxiety can be controlled by forcing control over breathing. Consciously focusing on breathing deeply and slowly is scientifically proven to be a way to return our nervous system to a more controllable state. These techniques are used to fight nervousness, anxiety, stress, negativity and even pain. The side effects of controlling automatic reflexes are also biologically as well as psychologically helpful. Biofeedback techniques can manipulate brain waves, muscle response, heart rate and even skin conductivity… in case you want to beat a lie detector.

Steer your lizard – I wonder what kind of response kicks in when someone is told that they can plan the reflexive part of their brain. Case by case we can analyze and deal with the response of the moment, but raising this to the conscious part of the brain allows us to learn from previous responses. Deprogramming the supposedly million-year inherited part of our brain is probably not possible, but conditioning that which was put there by our parents or our experience can be tempered with logic. What we sometimes call our inner child is composed of things put there before the neocortex was fully developed and consists of things we learned before age six. The more aware we become to the after-effects of reflexes the easier it is to plan for future responses.

Leadership is a whole-brain activity. The higher level of encouraging innovation, cooperation and engagement cannot be done in a vacuum. The lizard is always there and alert to our actions. The care and feeding of lizard brains is somewhat lower on the hierarchy of needs, but if we fail to provide the necessary safety, security and social needs we will fail.

 

Image credit: Composite – Yellow Warning Sign AJE & Tyrannosaurus Rex stefaninahill / 123RF Stock