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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steve Peters
Read between
July 16 - October 2, 2017
It would be wrong to say that certain characteristics are male and certain female but rather that some characteristics are found more frequently in females than in males and vice versa. There are therefore no specific characteristics that are purely male or purely female. Also, therefore, it would imply that there is not a feminine side to men or a masculine side to women, there are just characteristics.
You, the Human, have a personality, agenda and Humanity Centre. You think logically and work with facts and truth. • Your Chimp has a personality, agenda and Jungle Centre. It thinks emotionally and uses impressions and feelings. • The Chimp is an emotional machine that will hijack you, if you allow it to. It is not good or bad: it is a Chimp. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy. This is The Chimp Paradox.
The golden rule is that whenever you have feelings, thoughts or behaviours that you do not want or welcome, then you are being hijacked by your Chimp.
The simple answer is that the Chimp is more powerful and acts more quickly than the Human. A real chimpanzee has five times the strength of a human. In the same way, you can think of your emotional inner Chimp as having five times your strength. Therefore, you must learn to manage the Chimp if you are to be the person that you want to be.
A crucial step in Mind Management is accepting that your Chimp’s fundamental drives do not change. You can’t change the nature of the Chimp that you are working with. It is an emotional machine that is never going to be programmed differently. Your Chimp will always act on drives and according to its nature, with emotions and actions such as aggression, neurosis or impulsivity.
The main drives and needs of the Chimp are unique to your Chimp but for most Chimps these are a combination of power, territory, ego, dominance, sex, food, troop, security, inquisitiveness and parental drives.
So if you recognise that your Chimp has territorial drives then you need to nurture the Chimp by providing it with some territory and space. This can be a room, a flat, a house, a job with a role that is clearly defined or even just psychological space by escaping from the world into a book. Whatever you choose should satisfy your Chimp and should be carried out. It is the Human who carries the actions out and not the Chimp!
What is important for you is to recognise your own Chimp drives and to make sure that they are fulfilled in the way that you want them to be and to ensure that the sublimation is appropriate without you crossing boundaries.
You must allow it to do this if it is to listen. Allowing the Chimp to express emotion will calm it down and then the Chimp will be able to listen to reason or just go to sleep.
let it express its feelings and then when it has finished let the Human select the sensible things that have been said and ignore the nonsense.
The rambling gets more and more stupid but less and less powerful. After about ten minutes he stops and then we hear the Human saying, ‘I have had enough of this moaning.’ The Chimp is getting tired, if not exhausted. Please note that this rambling was very important to get the Chimp tired. If you suppress this rambling then it is less likely that you will be able to talk to the Chimp. So don’t hold back!
We never control the Chimp; we manage it. There is a difference. Remember that the Chimp is five times stronger than you; so do not use willpower to try to control it. It will defeat you in the long run. Instead manage the Chimp by exercising and boxing it.
The easiest way of recognising that the Chimp is thinking for you is when either you are becoming emotional or you are calm but have uneasy feelings.
Chimps like to survive; Humans like to have a purpose.
• ‘Do I want…?’ is the question to ask in order to recognise if your Chimp is hijacking you. If the answer is ‘no’ then you are being hijacked. • You are always responsible for your Chimp. • The Chimp is five times stronger than you are. • Nurture your Chimp before you try to manage it. • Manage your Chimp, don’t try to control it. • There are three common ways to manage your Chimp: Exercise, Box and Bananas.
It is Normal to have Chimp outbursts and activity that you will not manage well. Therefore, you should Expect this to happen from time to time. Accept that you are not perfect and this animal is very powerful. Take care of the outburst or activity by appropriate means, such as apologies if you have affected others, or by forgiving yourself if you feel you have let yourself down. Being NEAT means being reasonable with yourself.
Guilt, shame, frustration and other negative emotions are there to help us make repairs not to destroy us. Nobody gets it right all of the time and many of us get it wrong quite a lot of the time.
‘life is not fair’. This seems reasonable as a ‘Truth of Life’ to most of us because we know it is ‘true’. If we then say that this is true and we live by it, then we would not get particularly upset or not even get upset at all if something was unfair, because that is how we believe that life works. It doesn’t mean that we don’t try to be fair in life but it does mean that when life is unfair we accept it and deal with it.
My first three Truths of Life are: 1. Life is not fair. 2. The goal posts move. 3. There are no guarantees. If I manage to live by these ‘truths’ or rules then very little upsets me.
we all have to decide for ourselves what we want and how we want to act and what we want to believe. This is a choice, and with all choices come consequences. Only you can decide how you want to act in your world. If you want things to change then you have to look at things differently.
when you have identified the belief that sits behind your negative emotions you have to replace it with something. You are trying to create a new automatic thought, an Autopilot, or pathway, in the brain. You need to replace the Gremlin with a positive Autopilot statement and you need to think about this regularly, rehearsing it until it becomes your automatic response.
Remember: the values you hold in yourself are likely to be far more important than what you look like or what you can achieve.
To work out who you really are as a person is easy to do. If you wrote a list of all the things you would like to be, you may write things like calm, compassionate, reasonable, positive, confident and happy, then this is who you really are. Any deviation from this is a hijacking by the Chimp. This is a very important point.
we need to understand who is in front of us and how they think and work. If we accept this then we can work effectively with them but we have to be willing to look at people with an open mind in order to do this. In effect, our relationships with others are very often dictated by our expectation of them and our reactions to them.
Humans look for evidence and then draw up conclusions. Chimps draw up conclusions then look for evidence to support them.
If you want to build bridges with someone then it is you that has to build the bridge.
Successful people don’t make demands of others but set the scene so that the Human in others can respond, rather than their Chimp.
Ask yourself what effect you are having on others after you have interacted with them. Are you building them up or knocking them down? Are you coming across as an energiser or are you sapping their energies? Work out what effect you want to have, and then work on doing this with each interaction during the day. Monitor your progress by reflecting at the end of each day. Remember that sometimes people can be uncooperative no matter what you do, but count the successes that you have.
Never assume that because you have told someone something that they have heard it or understood it.
The Chimp lives in a jungle and needs looking after. • The Human lives in a society and needs looking after. • The Computer makes sense of these two worlds and comes up with the Real World. • The Real World is a fluctuating existence between two parallel worlds that change frequently. • Living in the Real World is learning how to survive and be happy.
Whenever you want to stop the Chimp, always actively slow your thinking down. This will work in ALL situations. It is another excellent way to manage the Chimp.
If things go wrong or you have failed at something, all you can do is to start from where you are and what you have got and then begin again.
One imaginative way of dealing with stress is to use a time machine. If you are worried or stressed about something, imagine you are going forward in a time machine to ten years ahead from now and you are looking back at the current situation. Ask yourself how you would have liked to have acted, and what you would have liked to have said. Ask yourself if getting stressed about the situation helped? Having established this in your mind you can now return to the current time and act in the way you want to.
The main point here is that if you hold an expectation that anything in your life will remain constant then it is very likely to be a source of stress when it doesn’t. To remove stress you need to live in the here and now and accept that changes are normal and work with them for the future.
Your well-rehearsed plan Write out your plan of action for dealing with sudden stress. Try to rehearse this by using your imagination to think of stressful situations and how you will now respond with your new plan. Work through them in your mind and also think about how it will all conclude with a more productive outcome.
if someone says something that evokes an emotional response in you, try to slow down your reaction to this by using the ‘change’ and ‘pause button’ as explained in this chapter and then move to calm rational Human thinking. Slowing down your responses will allow the Human to have a chance to operate and it will also prevent impulsive Chimp responses. Making this process a habit will establish the Autopilot in your Computer.
Dealing with chronic stress If you are stressed then it is useful to write down anything that you can see that is causing or contributing to the stress. Trying to unravel complicated scenarios in your head is not usually very successful. You tend to go round in circles, instead of dealing with and eliminating specific factors contributing to the problem.
divide up the solution areas into three parts: 1. Your own perceptions and attitudes to the problem 2. The circumstances and setting for the problem 3. Other people involved in the problem
Successful people are proactive, in other words they have a plan. They are also responsive, which means that if the plan fails for whatever reason, they respond by regrouping and immediately bring in another plan. They are very resilient and don’t give up. Unsuccessful people tend to be reactive. This means that they base their plans around reacting to problems and are constantly trying to fight back. They see life as a struggle.
If you wake during the night, any thoughts and feelings you might have are from your Chimp and they are very often disturbing, catastrophic and lacking in perspective. In the morning you are likely to regret engaging with these thoughts and feelings because you will see things differently. Try to develop an Autopilot that says I am not prepared to take any thinking seriously during night-time hours when the Chimp is in charge.
The problem with motivation is that it works on feelings from the Chimp and these can shift very quickly. Commitment, on the other hand, comes from the Human and does not depend on feelings. Commitment means following a plan even if you don’t feel like it that day. For example, a surgeon can’t say halfway through an operation, ‘Do you know I just don’t feel motivated to finish this, so I’ll stop now!’ Motivation doesn’t matter; it is commitment that will finish the operation.
Is it really a dream? • How important is this to you and your Chimp? • Do you and your Chimp really want to achieve it? • What are the benefits of achieving your dream? • Are the benefits worth having, compared to the cost of getting there? The plans and requirements to fulfil the dream • What plans have you made to achieve this? • What have you tried in the past? • If it failed in the past, why was this? • What are you going to do that is different this time? • What new strategies have you got for the future? • What worked in the past? • Have you made sure that your plans are watertight by
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Be disciplined and not just organised. Anyone can organise, by making a plan. Very few people can carry out the plan because they do not have the self-discipline. If you feel you are stalling or making excuses and not getting the task done, ask yourself the million-pound question. If you were given a million pounds to do the task before the end of the day could you do it? If the answer is yes, I would definitely have it completed, then this means that it is possible to do it.
All of us get disheartened from time to time and want to give up our dreams. When this happens, sometimes, paradoxical psychology works. This is where you basically say the opposite of what you want. So you can say to yourself it is okay to walk away from the dream. You don’t need to fulfil your dream and it is your choice: so off you go. It is surprising how often the Chimp, who is telling us it wants to walk away, suddenly reverses and says it has no intention of giving up and gets back into the dream. The Chimp does this because it recognises that the dream is still alive and it wants it
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to increase your chances of success you need to have ownership of your plans because following someone else’s plans, no matter how good they are, is not the same unless you fully agree with them. Owning the plan means that you have either formed it yourself, had a major say in it, or believe that the plan is ideal for you and you couldn’t do better.
When you become accountable, and it might even be to just yourself, you will audit the way things are going. Then you will step in quickly, if things are not going according to plan. So, responsibility can also be seen as accountability on a regular basis.
It is important to look back and celebrate what you have done. Reflecting on your hard work and effort is important to increase the chances of success.
Beating yourself up is a useless and damaging process and it is also a CHOICE. You don’t have to do it. Ask what good is it doing? Also ask is this the way that you want to deal with yourself? You can choose to look more objectively and see what you can do to improve, or accept the way that you are, with a smile. Things won’t get better by attacking and demeaning yourself. Relax and encourage yourself instead.
Psychological evidence says that we need to dream big and set extremely challenging goals if we want to increase our chances of success. Don’t aim for the moon but the stars. The ‘moon’ is a goal that you know you can achieve by effort. The ‘stars’ are a goal that you could achieve by great effort and it will feel fantastic to reach this goal.
Therefore make sure that your dreams excite you, as you are more likely to achieve them and if you do miss the stars you might still reach the moon!
