Whenever a human is under threat in some way, what’s going to happen is the amygdala, it’s a part of the brain, all this brain stuff gets in here, where it starts shooting into, it pulls in all these networks, to shoot into your brain ways to either fight that or flight that. So we’re going to try to preserve ourselves. So this could be in a sales call, this could be a customer, this could be a team member, this could be a board, this could be a boss. But the degree to which you feel threatened, then the brain goes from the higher brain where creativity, and problem solving and judgment, emotional regulation, perseverance, goal orientation, all this stuff lives, is going to help you deal with that situation. That brain because of what the amygdala has done to you, that brain shuts down and the fight or flight brain begins to get activated.
Now, in that scenario, nothing good is going to happen unless you’re about to get hit by a car or something. Where you look, “I can’t fight it so I’m going to dive out of the way.” It’s meant to react. Now, here’s the deal, you don’t see Navy Seals in battle reacting and doing stupid stuff. You see them in the most difficult situations thinking clearly. They’re in charge of their faculties.
Now, think about it, they’re in a situation most of us call a bad day. They live to get in that situation. But the difference is, the Seals have a saying. That saying is this, “You don’t rise to the challenge.” People say, “Well, they really rose to the challenge” or “She really . . .” They say that’s hogwash. You don’t rise to the challenge, you fall to your level of training. You fall to your level of preparedness.
So imagine this, you go into that board meeting, you got that chair of the board, you got the boss, you got the customer, you got the alliance, you got whatever, that just makes you crazy and you can’t perform as well. Well, that’s where training is needed. So you’re going to get more training to develop yourself to where that person doesn’t have that kind of power, and when they’re yelling at you, you’re able to come up with a lot of choices of a lot of options. “Do I shut this person down, do I let them vent, do I try to move them?” And you’re able to think and have a whole tool bag. But if you’re just reacting, you can’t do it.
So that’s where leadership development, and what Leadercast does and others, is so important because what’s happening is, you’re like a Navy Seal being trained for battle because if you build anything significant, you’re going to be in that room. And you’re going to be in those conversations. It might be with board members, investors, regulators, angry consumers because something went wrong.
The good thing about success is that the higher you go in whatever you’re doing, is it’s going to give you a great opportunity to have much bigger problems. Success is standing on a pile of problems having overcome them, but the only way you do that is by developing your capacities. So you develop the capacities on those capacities and the message of this book, “The Power of the Other” is that we only develop those capacities in relationship with people that can download them to us. You know the phrase “self-made man, or self-made woman” biggest oxymoron there ever was. Nobody is self-made.
I quote a lot of the science in this book about how research shows that the people whose brains are left under themselves in any arena of life, whether it’s from infancy to womb to the tomb, or middle-management, or the Olympics, or all of these performance situations, those brains rely on the power of the other to download two things, energy and information. Energy and coding. Ones and zeroes that are going to rewrite the code to your performance, and that’s why we need each other.
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