You Get What You Focus On — Not What You Hope For
Our neocortex allows us to focus our thought processes and to make sense of our world, but the world is a complex place and our brains have limited conscious processing capacity.
So the filters of our subconscious mind allow our conscious mind to focus on what we sense is really important — like getting out of our friend’s way.
The interruptions to our conscious thinking are generated by the orbital frontal cortex (just above the eyeballs). This part of the brain signals any issue that we had not expected. It is directly connected to the amygdala — the brain’s fear circuitry.
The amygdala is housed deep within the brain and performs a number of essential tasks to do with emotion and memory.
The amygdala is part of our primitive brain and when it fires signals to other brain circuits it gets our attention — and fast — as our animal reflexes take over.
A simple example of how we try to make sense of our world is the drawing below. We can choose to see a vase or two faces, but looking at the image for a few moments already causes confusion as our brain desperately tries to make sense of what it ‘sees’.
Our brains can be manipulated and we are creatures of habit. If I had primed your brain to see a face in the image before you looked at it, you would be more likely to see the face first — although the confusion may well ensue thereafter.
If we do something repeatedly we become better at it and do more of it at an unconscious level.
Any sport is hard to learn at first. My first attempts at golf were disastrous…very hit and miss, spraying balls all over the driving range. My golf coach told me to focus on not more than three aspects of my swing and to leave the rest to my unconscious mind. So, for example, keeping the head still, loosening the grip a little on the club and following through properly.
This building of habit into our subconscious applies not only to sport, it applies to business roles. The things we do every day build habits: neural patterns — different dots connected up in the brain.
And sometimes we shouldn’t wait for the amygdala to shake us out of a daily pattern. We need to build agility and change into our business-as-usual routines.
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Chris Martlew’s new book, Changing the Mind of the Organization — Building Agile Teams, is available for pre-order at amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, bol.com and other good bookstores.
Author’s royalties are donated to War Child.
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