More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steve Peters
Working on your body language, intonation, use of words and ambience will help to significantly improve the effectiveness of your communication with others.
You need to start by clearly defining to yourself what you want out of the conversation.
Remove the unreasonable parts of your Chimp’s agenda.
Approach the conversation in Human mode.
Help to manage the Chimp in the other person.
Allowing them a few minutes of what might be uncomfortable comments will help to settle their Chimp down.
At some point you have to forgive people for losing control of their Chimp and give them chance to become Human again, if you want to work with them.
Find the agenda of the Human and Chimp in the other person.
Clarify your own agenda.
Agree any common ground and outcomes aimed for.
Try to meet the other person’s agenda first before your own.
Try to meet your own agenda.
Summarise what you have agreed.
The best way of checking is to ask the person what they have understood from what you have said to them.
Never assume that because you have told someone something that they have heard it or understood it.
Smile and thank the person.
People are not mind readers, and often damage is done not by what we say but by what we don’t say.
These three levels are negotiation, mediation and arbitration. The last two involve the third person.
This is the first step to sorting things out. Approach the person yourself and try to find common ground by listening to each other, respecting opinion and agreeing to differ if you can’t agree.
The mediator doesn’t decide but just facilitates the conversation and provides the best setting for getting what you both want.
The arbiter is a person, agreed by both of you, to come in and listen and then to be the judge with a final decision on what will happen.
Check that you are talking to the right person for your agenda. Make sure it is the right time to have the conversation. Check that the place for the conversation is appropriate. Establish the agendas of your Chimp and Human. Remove the unreasonable parts of your Chimp’s agenda. Approach the conversation in Human mode. Remember to present the conversation with the right packaging. Help to manage the Chimp in the other person. Find the agenda of the Human and Chimp in the other person. Clarify your own agenda. Agree any common ground and outcomes aimed for. Try to meet the other person’s agenda
...more
Your Chimp exists in a jungle. It sees danger and territory everywhere and lives by the rules of the jungle. • Your Human exists in a society with people in it, abiding by laws. • Your Computer makes sense of both the Chimp and the Human perceptions, and interprets these, and comes up with the real world that you live in: a mixture of society and jungle that is forever alternating.
So as the Chimp begins its journey into its jungle it will look for familiarity to make it feel secure. It will search out its troop and it will crave routine.
This means that your Chimp must be able to handle the emotional environment that it is living in.
Realising that your lifestyle is not matching your Chimp’s needs, and doing something about it, is one of the keys to being at peace within yourself.
The right part of the jungle is where your work and home environments are happy places to be.
Learning to live within your means is an excellent way to stop the Chimp from fretting.
The right food for your Chimp is emotional food. It needs satisfaction and peace of mind. Don’t give your Chimp indigestion by asking it to accept and live with inappropriate emotions, for example, stress or unhappiness.
Giving yourself this emotional rest is very important to your Chimp.
Having no purpose is soul-destroying to a Human.
Therefore, start your day by asking yourself what you would like to achieve by the end of the day.
The Human relishes and thrives on having a purpose, whether this is short-term or long-term.
It’s nature’s way of telling you that something is wrong and that you need to act to put it right.
Don’t just react to stress; deal with it constructively.
Under stress, the Chimp will go into Fight, Flight or Freeze mode, depending on what it thinks is best.
An Autopilot is the way to manage sudden stress.
Recognition and change 2. The pause button 3. Escape 4. The helicopter and getting perspective 5. The plan 6. Reflection and activation 7. Smile
As soon as you realise you are stressed, you must activate the Computer.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to imagine a big pause button in your Computer that causes the Chimp to freeze and then press it when you realise the Chimp is reacting.
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.
Imagine your whole life as a timeline from start to finish and see where you are at this particular point in time.
Ask yourself, ‘How important is this situation to the rest of my life?’; ‘Is this situation going to last for ever or will it pass and things change?’; ‘What are the really important things in my life, and is this one of them, or has it changed them?’
Remind yourself that everything in life will pass. You will soon look back on this mo...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What can you do practically to alter things and what things do you have to accept and work with?
Generally, you can control everything about yourself and reactions, you can control a little of the circumstances, but you can’t control other people. Accept this!
Laughing at yourself, or situations, is one of the most powerful ways to remove stress from the Chimp.
whatever happens life will go on and whatever happens now may have little relevance in ten years’ time.
I can choose to accept the situation rather than keep on saying “what if” or “this shouldn’t have happened” or even worse, “life should be fair”.’
He remains focused on the solution and not the problem.
