Less than 1/10th second to trust or not

19 January 2016 by Anne Riches Leave a Comment

Do you make snap judgments? Do you jump to conclusions?

When you’re at a party, a bar, deciding where to sit on a bus, serving a customer, interviewing someone, meeting your new boss, meeting staff as their new boss, watching new neighbours move in – how long does it takes you to ‘sum someone up’? What if you see the face of an alleged criminal on the television? And how long does it take when you meet your daughter’s new boyfriend or your boyfriend’s new girl? Two minutes? Ten minutes? Think again.

I am sure you would say you make a considered decision and don’t rush to conclusions. You might say: ‘I always give someone the benefit of the doubt’. But we all know it doesn’t work like that – and the science appears to back up what really happens.

What the science says

According to some research published in the Journal of Psychological Science by Professor Alex Todorov of Princeton University, it takes us less than 1/10th of a second to decide if we trust someone or not. We respond intuitively to faces so rapidly that our reasoning minds may not have time to influence our reaction. And our intuitions about attraction and trust are among those we form the fastest.

“The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn’t stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance,” says Todorov, “We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.”

Trustworthiness and fear are connected

Why does this happen? Can we change our reaction? [Read more…]

Do you know what drives your team?

23 November 2015 by Anne Riches Leave a Comment

Ever since she was a child Amy loved to swim. She was one of those water babies that just seemed at home in a pool or in the ocean. As Amy grew up she went to swimming lessons and from a very young age, began to excel. Amy spent most of her spare time in the pool, she loved it. The feeling of weightlessness brought back memories of summers at the beach; even the smell of chlorine or salt water reminded her of happy times.

Amy began to train long hours early in the mornings with a coach who saw her obvious potential. She got up everyday at 5am and trained before school. Some mid winter mornings it seemed like madness to be up at the crack of dawn doing laps in a freezing pool. She was often so tired that homework took a back seat. But Amy never faltered, every time she took to the water she felt alive.

Failure didn’t stop her

Although she began competing at a young age Amy never really won anything. She always made the finals but throughout her adolescence she just didn’t have the physical speed of some of her peers.

Sometimes she felt like giving up but her love of swimming drove her on through countless failures and hours of training. Even when it seemed she couldn’t go on, something inside her pushed her forward. She trained harder, spent longer in the pool and at the gym. Her goal to be the world’s best was an obsession and she would not let anything stand in her way. She was so afraid of not being able to achieve what she so desperately wanted that she fought harder at every turn.

Facing reality

Amy was devastated when her coach and her family finally persuaded her that although she was fast, she was not fast enough to have a future career in swimming. In fact they were worried that she might not have a career at all if she didn’t spend more time on school work. Amy felt like her world had come to an end. [Read more…]

Do you sabotage yourself at work?

16 November 2015 by Anne Riches Leave a Comment

I want to share the story of Tracy. Tracy landed her dream job working for a start up company. She was to be part of a team to launch a new and exciting product. Although apprehensive, Tracey couldn’t wait to start. She was the most junior in the team of five but she specialized in an area in which the others were limited. Life was looking good.

Almost as soon as she started, Tracy felt intimidated by the others in the group. They were all experienced and talented. Sensibly, Tracy made a conscious decision to just put her head down and work to the best of her ability.

However, almost from the start, she had trouble accepting feedback and guidance from her team leader. Even the smallest piece of advice or direction made her feel angry and insecure. In fact, she had a number of quite emotional altercations with her team leader. Not so sensibly, after each one, she sent an email to another team member complaining about the team leader.
[Read more…]

Want to ged rid of bad memories?

17 August 2015 by Anne Riches Leave a Comment

We all have memories we wish we could forget.

Unfortunately getting rid of them is far more complex than the ease with which we lay them down in our brains.

But the neuroscientists are making progress all the time.

Here’s a progress piece in Mind and Brain, Scientific American August edition. It’s worth the read.

How the brain purges bad memories

Emotions aren’t reasonable

3 August 2015 by Anne Riches Leave a Comment

The emotions aren’t always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
– William James

Workplaces bring together a diverse array of personalities and professional styles. This diversity can be extremely productive or it can be a major headache for everyone, especially managers. Interpersonal relationships and the wide range of people’s reactions require a lot of our attention and energy.

It is important for anyone who is managing or working with a group of people to understand the role The Almond Effect® plays in the workplace. I created this concept to give us insight into other employee’s behaviour as well as our own leadership style. The Almond Effect® is when our amygdala trigger us to react without thinking, and we say or do things that we regret afterwards.

As a friend of mine said recently, “I have some minor challenges, doing ‘almond’ things at present. At least I can see them happening, and am trying not to react.”

Positive and Negative reactions

In your workplace, you probably know who usually reacts negatively to certain events. You also know who will take a positive approach and proactively deal with situations.

How people respond is linked to our limbic brain’s primary goal of survival and the fight or flight mechanism. In tense situations at work, whether you’ fight’, so to speak, or take flight, depends on your past experiences, emotional intelligence and emotional memory. It is a natural instinctive response. It happens because the main function of our amygdala (the emotional receptor in our brain) is to recognise and survive threats. Even though perceived threats in the work place aren’t life threatening, this part of the brain still responds as if they were.

Look at this example of a fight response at work. A manager or team member takes offence when his/her logic or ideas are questioned or challenged. I have seen this happen often and I am sure you have too. There are three possible responses – stay in control, fight or flight.

A person with high-level Reaction Management skills may feel anxious or even angry but will still manage to control himself or herself and respond calmly, logically. This is proactive reaction to an emotional surge. They are in control of their emotions, not the other way around.

The Almond Effect® takes hold

On the other hand, another person may take offence, feel insecure, get angry and in turn react aggressively to the challenge, shouting at people, threatening them. This is an example of a negative and over-reactive response. Their brain’s reaction to what it perceives as a threat is to ‘fight’ which is usually an inappropriate mode of response to a natural workplace situation.

Alternatively, they might storm out of the room, or burst into tears or just withdraw, giving everyone ‘the silent treatment’. This is the flight reaction. In both situations, they have just experienced The Almond Effect® and acted without thinking.

The potential difficulty here is that The Almond Effect® may not stay confined to the person whose ideas have been challenged. Once anyone in the room witnesses a verbal attack on a colleague, they in turn may experience The Almond Effect®, and react in a way they may later regret. Emotions are contagious. The bad feeling is now established.

It is a statement of the obvious that staying in control is more conducive to a sound-working environment. And this relates to all interactions in an office or other workplaces, at all levels and with all relationships.

Why STAR Reaction Management is important

STAR Reaction Management is something that can help us in our careers and in our personal relationships. A high level of Reaction Management involves self awareness and management of your own emotions as well as a level of consideration and thoughtful responses to others’ emotions. If you can increase your ability to manage your reactions you can decrease the negative outcomes of The Almond Effect®.

STAR also gives an understanding of the neuroscience that you can tap into to create better relationships by understanding how and why you, and others, react in the way we do.

We will explore the components of this Stop – Think – Act – Rewire model in other blog posts.

So consider if you have ever reacted poorly when someone has challenged your ideas or proposal? What happened? In hindsight, was the way you reacted appropriate? What would you do differently if you could have that moment again? What would it take to bring about that different reaction? Reflecting on these questions are all steps towards increasing our self-awareness and our ability to manage The Almond Effect® not only at work but also at home.

As we know only too well, in a workplace with lots of ‘personalities’, we can’t control someone else’s reactions in certain situations, the only reaction we can control is our own.