The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness

by Steve Peters

I cannot urge you enough to return to your Stone of Life and if necessary perfect and redraw your poster. When you get this clear in your mind it will be the most settling influence on your Chimp, your Human and your very existence. Remember that the Stone of Life is by far the most powerful stabiliser for your Psychological Mind and indeed for your entire Universe.

If the Chimp and the Human are relaxed and are not worried, then you will automatically work with the Computer, which means you can perform routine daily tasks without conscious effort as your Computer works according to an automatic programme. However, if any danger or unusual circumstances appear then the Chimp or Human will wake up and take over.

You cannot stop the Chimp from reacting to anything that happens (shown as the first step on both pathway options), however, you can stop the Chimp from acting on this reaction.

This time the Human sits down and thinks about what road rage is all about and logically decides it does not want to act like a Chimp and be fooled into Chimp mentality. It would rather act like a civilised person and accept that we have to share our civilised world with some not-so-pleasant people but it isn’t worth fighting with them over trivia.

If we rehearse our beliefs and truths regularly then the Computer will stop the Chimp from reacting. This takes little, if any, energy and is the best way to deal with the Chimp. The Stone of Life is the ultimate power source in our Psychological Mind.

It is critical to understand that your Chimp’s personality has nothing to do with you; it is a machine that was given to you to work with. You may have a very different personality to your Chimp. The Computer merely modifies what the Human and Chimp are presenting, and depending on how you have programmed it, it can be a helpful or unhelpful influence.

The Human, Chimp and Computer all have inherited traits handed down to them. For example, the Chimp inherits various emotional traits, the Human inherits the ability to think logically or artistically and the Computer inherits the ability to form programmes for languages or music. These traits are of different strengths in different people, so those who inherit anxiety traits will find it harder to remain calm than those who inherit more relaxed traits.

Very often the way that we interpret our experiences is more important than the experiences that we have.

Apart from your genes and the experiences you have, there are other

main factors found in the Human and Chimp that influence the way in which you act. For example, the tenacity that you have to fulfil your drives and ambitions is a major factor for success and is part of your personality. How flexible and adaptable you are to different situations will also determine how successful you will be in your ventures. Repeated ingrained behaviours, or habits, are generally accepted as the way in which your personality is demonstrated, so behaviours are often worth changing if they are unhelpful! We have discussed the Mindset under the Computer chapter. Clearly the Mindset that you hold, constructed in the Computer, will also contribute to the personality that you have and influence the way that the Human and Chimp act and think. People who have a positive image of themselves and of others, and who live in a world that is perceived as pleasant, are far more likely to have the same kind of personality.

With all of these factors having varying degrees of influence on your final personality, how can you determine who you really are? 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.

Remember: the person that you want to be is the person that you really are.

What is happening is that as you are trying to be you, the Chimp keeps interfering or hijacking you with emotion or emotional thoughts and making you present yourself to the world in a way that you don’t like.

If you do not recognise this hijacking then you may become disillusioned with yourself and feel like you are constantly failing. This in turn may lead to you beating yourself up. This is such a worthless thing to do. Beating yourself up for perceived failure, or self-loathing, is a destructive and useless waste of time and emotion.

I would like you to see yourself as the person that you want to be, but the Chimp and some Gremlins are stopping you. With this understanding you can move forward by getting frustrated with the

Chimp and Gremlins and not yourself, and then work on managing the Chimp and removing the Gremlins. This is far more constructive.

when they manage their Chimp and maintain their Computer then the real person emerges.

Let’s assume a miracle has happened and that the Chimp is no longer on the move, whatever you do. It has permanently gone to sleep or only offers helpful emotions. Let’s also assume that we have removed all Gremlins from the Computer. What you would now be is a more relaxed individual showing Human characteristics. However, to be happy means that you must cultivate this mood and to do this you need to define how you will make yourself happy. Likewise, to be calm we need plans to deal with stress and to carry them out. Developing any aspect of your personality will need time spent on it. It is easiest to work on each aspect one at a time and to monitor your progress.

Developing the Human and bringing out the best in you is about: • Developing yourself • Managing your Chimp and removing the Gremlins • Communicating effectively • Having the right people around you • Creating a world for yourself to ...

In autism, some areas of the brain do not function well and some areas are very highly sensitive. For example, a child or adult with autistic spectrum disorder has great difficulty reading facial expression or body language. They have problems understanding emotion in others and therefore may act or say things that seem inappropriate to most of us. If we understand that they do not mean offence then we can start to work with this person. We can help them get the best out of themself so that we can form a beneficial relationship with them. Autism comes on a spectrum, with the most severe forms easily identifiable and the milder forms barely recognisable.

The important lesson here is that 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.

Interestingly there are psychopaths in practically every occupation – for example, doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers – but they learn to contain and work with the brain they have got and stay on the right side of the law. The estimate varies, but a rough figure is that this kind of brain occurs in around 1 in 150 people.

Simply speaking, the brain of a psychopath lacks the Humanity Centre that the rest of us have, which is in the Human part of our heads. The Humanity Centre contains areas that evoke such things as guilt, remorse, compassion, empathy and conscience. Psychopaths are typically just cold and calculating individuals that use others to their advantage. So is a psychopath really responsible or not for their actions? There is a great deal of argument about this, but whatever we believe, there is a lot of evidence that this centre in the brain is either absent or asleep.

Don’t expect the psychopath to change – the brain is hard-wired.

Snow White Mindset This Mindset is more common in women than in men. If we take Snow White as being an innocent, passive victim at the hands of others and circumstance, who is completely devoid of any responsibility or accountability and has no power to change things, then we start to understand the Mindset.

The features that this Mindset displays are a mixture of the following: • The world is a place that belongs to them and others are in their world. • They give people a value on how they can use them to fulfil their own ambitions. • They dominate by believing that getting the best out of a situation means showing zero tolerance to people. • Compassion is seen as weakness. • Others’ opinions are irrelevant in most cases, as they believe that their opinion is right. • Ignoring someone who is seen as being of little value is the best way of dealing with

• Any challenges are met with aggression and hostility. • Any admissions to errors, or being wrong, are merely given lip service and dismissed quickly.

In nature, the Alpha Wolf’s power is respected and feared but the Alpha Wolf itself is not respected. Similarly, the Alpha Wolf Mindset is unpopular and there is always another Wolf waiting to take over the prime position. Beware the Alpha Wolf Mindset – it makes people around it extremely unhappy and it is only a matter of time before an attack brings down the Wolf.

Understanding a Mindset helps us to understand others and how to deal with them.

When we meet other people there are three approaches that can help us to understand them better: • Try not to make assumptions about others. • Try not to have preconceived expectations of others. • Beware of prejudice.

It is always useful to remember that every person is living within his or her own world and at times it may not be a pleasant one. Finding out about the world they live in, or accepting that there may be influences on them that you are not aware of, can help to stop assumptions being made.

A golden rule for understanding people and situations is to ALWAYS try to establish THE FACTS before you make your assessment.

A word of warning: don’t base ‘the facts’ on hearsay or gossip. Hearsay is when someone starts telling you what somebody else said or thought and this then can influence your view of him or her. Whenever possible, get in touch with the person and ask them what they really said. Don’t accept information about somebody else’s opinion unless it comes directly from that person.

If you meet someone and do not have any preconceived ideas about them, or hold prejudice or expectations, then you are more likely to engage constructively with them and to find out who they really are.

First impressions are known as the primacy effect. When we meet someone, we pick up on many things including their demeanour, how they are dressed, their attitude, the intonation of their voice, what they say. In new situations the blood supply in your brain will be directed to the Chimp because there is a potential danger. As your Chimp meets the person it interprets these clues as to the type of

person that you are dealing with. Research shows that if your Chimp gets this first impression wrong then it will take it about seven more meetings with that person before it changes its mind!

If your Chimp is inflexible or holds a prejudice, then it can take even longer, because you are holding onto Gremlins that keep the Chimp fuelled up to hold that belief. This is the reason some people neve...

Humans look for evidence and then draw up conclusions. Chimps draw up conclusions then look for evidence to support them. The Chimp’s error, therefore, is to make a decision on someone and then look for evidence to prove its point. It has self-fulfilling prophecies. This is purely emotional thinking.

If you want to build bridges with someone then it is you that has to build the bridge. Don’t expect them to build it with you, because if you approach someone with that attitude it is very likely to fail. This is your choice and your decision.

once you expect something back then there may be problems. Most people will return the bridge-building once you start the process. However, if they don’t, then either call it a day or keep going without expectations or demands on them, until you think you have had enough. It is your decision to decide whether a relationship is worth investing in.

Successful people don’t make demands of others but set the scene so that the Human in others can respond, rather than their Chimp.

Remember: if you want a picture painted find an artist. If you really want a partner who can read body language and is sensitive to your unspoken needs, then go out and find one but if you choose to stay with one who can’t, or possibly even won’t, then don’t complain. It’s your choice to accept a painting not painted by an artist! Being tolerant means understanding how we are all different and the easiest way to be tolerant is to have little, if any, expectation of the people that you meet but to just accept them as they are and to work with this. Again, you don’t have to stay with someone who refuses to try or who can’t meet your expectations. It is your choice to stay but you are being unreasonable if you complain or make demands of them.

Imagine a scenario where a friend of yours calls you one night to explain that their cat is starving to death. So you ask why this is happening. They say, ‘Well, every night I ask the cat if it wants chicken or fish to eat and it just won’t answer. So it doesn’t get anything.’ It isn’t the cat that’s lacking intelligence! Sometimes people just can’t do what you are asking them to do and getting annoyed isn’t helpful. Think again if you are annoyed with someone, and check to make sure that you are not asking a cat to speak.

At this point it is wise to remind ourselves of some obvious truths when it comes to expectations of people. These include: • Not all people are going to be friendly. • Some people never change. • Some people never understand. • Some people are not going to like you. • People and Chimps vary from day to day. • No one is all bad. • No one is all good. • No one is going to agree with everything you say, every time.

If you took five people from the population and asked them if they liked you or understood you then you are likely to get the following response. One of them will love you and understand you regardless of what you do or say. They will be on your side. One of them will dislike you and not understand you, no matter what you do. Three of them will be more balanced and will weigh you up in an objective manner. This means that you really have to accept that there are a few million people in each of these categories, so expect to have enemies who are against you and don’t like you and criticise you no matter

what you do. Often these people are very unreasonable and very vocal and there is nothing you can do to change this. Try to ignore unbalanced and opinionated criticism of you. Rather, listen to the balanced majority who will be supportive and have constructive comments, even though at times they may be critical.

Apart from wanting companionship, both the Human and the Chimp welcome the troop but for different reasons. The troop is something that virtually all Chimps need. The troop is something that nearly every Human would like.

The need to belong to a group is so powerful that we will often compromise our lives and lifestyle in order to remain as part of the group.

With this in mind, you can appreciate how important, and how strong, is the drive to be accepted and approved by the troop. Your inner Chimp is telling you that there is danger everywhere and you must be part of a troop. To stay within this troop you must be seen as strong (and impress others at all times), you must be sure to be popular (keep everyone happy) and above all you must ensure that others think highly of you (you must care what they think).