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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Rock
With the reduced threat response from the increase in positive emotions, you have plenty of resources for the prefrontal cortex to help you think on multiple levels. This means that with a perception of high status, there is more chance you can activate your director when you want to.
The ongoing fight for status has other downsides. While competition can make people focus, there will always be losers in a status war. It’s a zero sum game.
Another strategy for managing status is to help someone else feel that her status has gone up. Giving people positive feedback, pointing out what they do well, gives others a sense of increasing status, especially when done publicly.
I saw that there are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues. These domains form a model, which I call the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong threat for people in most situations.
As “constructive” as you try to make it, feedback packs a punch. The result is that most feedback conversations revolve around people defending themselves.
Bringing to mind problems…well, brings them to mind. Unless you take care to label your emotions when they are at a high level, and not dwell on them, bringing problems to mind will increase limbic arousal, making it harder to solve them.
One of the most common strategies human beings use to help one another solve problems involves these techniques: giving advice about what to do or what not to do. Ohlsson shows that this is only marginally effective.
You could help the person increase her sense of status, perhaps by encouraging her. Or increase someone’s sense of certainty by making implicit issues more explicit, say, by clarifying your objectives. Or increase a person’s sense of autonomy by ensuring that he is making the decisions and coming up with the ideas, not just listening to your suggestions.
Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.
If you stop and think more deeply here, do you think you know what you need to do to resolve this? What quiet hunches do you have about a solution, deeper inside? How close to a solution are you? Which pathway to a solution would be best to follow here?
One big advantage of this technique is that it raises people’s status by implicitly saying, “You have good ideas. Let’s explore what your good ideas are, rather than think about mine.”
Changing one’s own behavior is hard. A study found that only one in nine people who underwent heart surgery were able to change their lifestyle, and these people had the ultimate “motivation”—possible death. Changing other people’s behavior is even harder.
The behaviorists generalized their observations to everyone, and this approach has since become the dominant way of thinking about motivation in society at large. The trouble is, the carrot-and-stick approach doesn’t work well with adults.
It’s not hard to change your brain. You just need to put in enough effort to focus your attention in new ways.
Putting all this together, all you need to do to change a culture, whether at home or at work, is focus other people’s attention in new ways long enough.
Many great leaders understand intuitively that they need to work hard to create a sense of safety in others. In this way, great leaders are often humble leaders, thereby reducing the status threat.
May your cortisol levels stay low, your dopamine levels high, your oxytocin run thick and rich, your serotonin build to a lovely plateau, and your ability to watch your brain at work keep you fascinated until your last breath.
