Becoming fearless
Our minds are the most powerful creative force in existence. Unless we feel threatened. Unlock your full potential and the potential of those around you by understanding how our primitive instincts are triggered. Transform how you lead and work to help people become their bravest and boldest selves.
I’m not a fan of spiders.
I can vividly remember an incident when I was 5 involving a very large spider.
I grew up in Hong Kong where spiders come in 3 sizes: Small, large and apex predators.
This was the latter.
The moment I first noticed it, inching its way towards my leg, I jumped out of my skin, dropped everything and ran as fast as I could for help.
My mum was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready.
I blurted out that there was a massive spider in my bedroom, waving my arms as wide as they would go to warn her of the size of the beast.
She didn’t believe how big it was.
She followed me to my room and stood in the doorway, looking around warily.
Then she saw it.
She jumped back.
She didn’t believe how big it was.
I prodded her in the back to get her attention. She jumped again.
“What is it?” she blurted out, with a panicked look.
“Get it!” I said, handing her a tiny, spongey cricket bat.
Luckily for the spider, she declined my offer and decided it was best to shut the door and wait until my dad got back, by which time it had gotten bored and left.
Throughout that sequence of events — which we still talk about today — we were both exhibiting the telltale signs of our brain’s highly evolved response mechanism.
A mechanism triggered by a series of electrical signals and a flood of chemicals.
Triggered
Looking back, those feelings of high alertness and fear that we felt are the same feelings that all of us experience every time we feel threatened.
This instinctive threat response is handy when you’re trying to avoid enormous spiders, but it’s much less useful when you’re in a work situation.
In a work situation, it’s not uncommon for people to experience the fright, fight or flight sensation when they have to speak to a large group of people or have to undergo a significant workplace transformation that displaces them from their familiar physical surroundings.
When people feel threatened, they can become irritable, intolerant to new ideas, uncreative and overly critical, none of which are productive or conducive to productivity.
So, if we’re planning on helping people feel more creative, open to new ideas and able to reach their full potential we should work to minimise situations where people feel threatened.
The good news is that with a little empathy and preparation, we can avoid many of the situations where we feel fearful, and instead create conditions where people feel fearless.
The trick is to learn how our brains function, work out what triggers our negative instincts and make small changes to how we behave to minimise the chances of triggering events.
Let’s start by taking a quick little trip through our minds to learn how our brains work.
The 3-part Brain
According to Paul D. MacLean, an American neuroscientist, our brains have 3 interconnected parts that evolved over the millennia to give us our subconscious and conscious abilities.
The 3 parts are -
- The Lizard Brain, which is sometimes referred to as the Reptilian brain.
- The Mammal Brain or Limbic brain, and
- The Human Brain or Neocortex as it’s sometimes known.
The Human Brain is the biggest part of our 3-part Brain and the part we associate it with things like language, abstract thinking, imagination and reasoning.
It’s the part we think of as our consciousness.
The bit that is “us”.
It’s the part of your brain that is “reading” these words right now.
The other parts of your brain are still working but on a subconscious level.
Unless something triggers them into action, in which case, your Lizard Brain will take over.
The Lizard Brain
Your Lizard Brain is wired up to your senses.
When we see, smell, taste, touch or hear something, our Lizard Brains pick up the signal and is the first part of our brains to decides what to do next. It’s our early warning system.
If our Lizard Brain detects a physical threat, like a big spider, or like the GIF below, an object flying towards us at high speed, it triggers an alarm.
That alarm system floods our bodies with Adrenaline and Cortisol.
The Adrenaline that’s just been pumped into your body is making your heart pump faster and harder, boosting energy levels and preparing your body to freeze, fight or run from danger.
The Cortisol that is released at the same time increases sugar levels in the bloodstream, providing more reserves of fuel to deal with the threat if it’s needed.
That same flood of Cortisol also quietens down our other brain functions to help us focus on dealing with the here and now.
According to Alla Weinberg, author of A Culture of Safety, the effect of Cortisol on our brain is strong enough “… to override our thinking brain whenever it senses real or imagined danger. If the primitive brain registers a threat, our rational brain quiets down and our operating IQ drops to between 50 and 70 points. This is half of our operating IQ… Half.”
If we’re looking to help people be as productive, collaborative and creative as possible, it’s essential then that we understand and limit threat triggers.
We’ll come back to tactics to limit threats at the end of this article, but let’s assume for a moment that we’re not in any physical danger, what else might trigger our brains?
For this, we next have to consider our Mammal Brain.
The Mammal Brain
Our Mammal Brain is tied to our emotions and rather than dealing with threats, it helps us distinguish between positive and negative things in our environment.
It’s also tied to our memories, sense of location and our habits which all help to reinforce what we should and shouldn’t do or focus on in different places and stages of life.
It’s believed our Mammal brain helped us adapt to rearing and nurturing children and developing strong family bonds.
When we detect something positive, like an interesting story, a catchy song or a chance to form a positive bond with someone our Mammal brains trigger a release of Dopamine.
Dopamine creates focus, builds motivation and locks ideas into memory more effectively (remember this, we’ll come back to it).
This type of emotion-memory connection helps us develop those close personal bonds with our friends and family, remember stories more easily and is part of the reason why we can’t get those damn, catchy tunes out of our heads once we think of them.
The dopamine-enhanced emotion-memory connection makes recall easier.
Sometimes, like with those catchy tunes, it is so strong it sometimes gets stuck in a loop.
Just as we can get caught in a positive loop, we can get caught in a negative loop.
When we detect something negative, a different part of our Mammal brain creates a different type of emotion-memory connection which, like our Lizard brains when under threat, triggers a mental command to our Human Brain that overrides our rational thought process by telling us to avoid these situations.
People with more depressive tendencies can get stuck in a loop with a negative emotion or memory and become less and less capable of having a rational or imaginative thought.
Just think about the last time you lay awake at night dwelling on a negative feeling.
That’s your Mammal brain taking over on an endless loop.
So as well as helping people feel safe in their surroundings, we need to be mindful that people instinctively need to feel a sense of connection and of being valued on an emotional level by those around them.
Again, we’ll come back to techniques to help work on this, but for now, let’s complete our journey through our minds from the subconscious, to the emotional, to the rational.
Let’s look next at the Human Brain.
The Human Brain
The Human Brain is our conscious, creative, thinking brain.
It’s the part of our brains that helped us develop language, art and science, that enables us to conceive of ideas and ask questions, to collaborate, to create and test theories.
It is the most incredible part of our brains, and the most useful one to harness to help us be our most productive, our bravest and boldest selves unless of course, we think our thoughts, ideas and questions are not valued by those around us and our sense of Psychological Safety comes under threat.
When that happens, we can get caught in a negative loop and shut down our ability for rational or creative thought.
Think of those times you’ve been in a meeting and the person talking asks for questions and feedback and the room is silent, or when your questions and ideas have either not been invited or are shut down by others.
Psychological safety can also be compromised when you share an idea and someone says “Yes, but…” which can serve to devalue your idea or change it so it doesn’t feel like yours any more.
So the final idea to be aware of is that people need to feel like their questions and ideas are valid and worthy of a healthy debate and consideration, otherwise they won’t be willing to share either and contribute and collaborate effectively.
Becoming Fearless
As a quick recap then, if you’re looking for ways to be more productive, collaborative and innovative, it’s essential you develop a culture that values and nurtures conditions of physical, emotional and psychological safety.
Creating this type of culture starts with Empathy and takes patience as you help break people out of their sense of helplessness.
Alla Weinberg has some fantastic suggestions in her book, especially about the situation that many people find themselves in — thinking about coming back into the office.
As anyone undergoes a change to their physical environment, it’s important to gauge what might be infringing on people’s physical safety by asking them what things are ok and what things are not ok, giving them a sense of control and contribution over their surroundings.
Introducing regular wellbeing check-ins at the start of existing weekly rituals is a simple way to assess levels of emotional safety.
It’s easy to introduce checks each week to see how people are feeling on a scale of 1–5, or select a picture or photo of others expressing feelings to describe how you’re feeling.
You can use these emotional check-ins as a way to show that emotions are valued and as a mechanism to come up with ideas to help and actions to take as a group and put people in control of improving how they feel.
If you’re a leader, then the behaviour you role model is often critical to fostering a culture of safety, especially psychological safety.
Being mindful of how you encourage others to share ideas and ask questions is essential.
It can feel instinctive to answer questions or contribute or embellish the ideas of others, but if you’re looking for others to contribute more, it’s essential you not only give them the space to ask and answer questions themselves but provide encouragement to do so (rather than always offering your own opinion straight away).
Sometimes, it can be hard to realise how your behaviour is affecting those around you, so if you want to improve, then a healthy dose of self-reflection combined with feedback from people at every level of your organisation can help to find areas for improvement.
Marshall Goldsmith’s book, “What got you here won’t get you there” is full of useful tips to help your self-reflection, including
- Getting 360-degree feedback from your peers
- Asking others to collect feedback on your behalf
Whilst asking for feedback it’s useful to encourage people to
- Let go of the past and be a part of creating a better future
- Assume positive intent behind behaviours
- Provide frank and specific feedback
- Be constructive and helpful with suggestions
- Focus on improvements that can be made by everyone involved
Summary
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip through the mind.
There’s clearly a lot we can do to create the right conditions for ourselves and others to become fearless and their bravest and boldest selves.
If you’re feeling a bit worried about starting a journey of change to overcome fear, don’t worry, it’s only natural.
Chances are though, that everyone around you is feeling the same and a simple and genuine “How are you feeling?” is enough to get the ball rolling.
Want to learn more?
Here are some fantastic videos that help bring some of these ideas to life.
