Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (6 page)

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Fear of the recession—
“Things are so bad. I may never be able to survive my losses.”

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Fear of success—
“If I succeed, am I going to have to maintain this? How can I stay on top? People will expect so much of me. I can’t stand the pressure.”

Thus, fears are an instrumental part of leaders’ lives and heavily influence the way they make decisions. When coaching a leader (or yourself if you are one), how do you go about doing this? That is, what is going on in the brain and why does this matter to leaders?

If leaders are able to conquer their fears, they will be in a much better position to think and make better decisions. In addition, they will be able to influence their followers in more effective ways, as we will now understand. A series of experiments in brain science have elucidated how fear registers in the brain and why it is so important to understand how it does this.

The Concepts

The following concepts illustrate the impact of conscious and unconscious fear on the brain.

Concept 1

The amygdala, which is found deep inside the brain, lights up when we are presented with something fearful. The amygdala is not just a fear detector, however; it detects all emotions. It just lights up to fear because it processes emotions in order of their significance, and when fear is the most significant emotion in your brain, the amygdala will light up.

When researchers presented fearful faces to subjects who were lying inside an MRI scanner, they saw that the amygdala lit up,
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as shown in
Figure 2.1
.

Figure 2.1. Schematic representation of amygdala activation to fear

Conclusion:
When fear is the most dominant emotion on your mind, it taxes your unconscious brain, which usually does most of the fast processing of information for you. By taxing the unconscious with fear, you eat up valuable brain resources that could otherwise be used to build your business. Although we are not entirely clear about the complete significance of the amygdala lighting up, the evidence does confirm that the amygdala processes fear.

For example, Jack B. is an entrepreneur who had left his secure job as a project manager to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. After he left his job, he started to read as much as he could about how to achieve entrepreneurial success. Although he learned a fair amount by reading, he constantly came across statistics about how unlikely it was to be successful as an entrepreneur. He put this aside, but every time he came across these statistics, they frightened him. In the context of this experiment, his amygdala would have activated, making him more anxious. As a result, his “unconscious fear wheel” would be spinning even when he was thinking about other things.

This was the first level of knowledge that researchers had. However, what followed was even more impressive and astounding.

Concept 2

Researchers then wondered, if fear can activate the unconscious that’s one thing, but what if fear itself is unconscious? What if you are surrounded by bad news, dread, and fear all the time although you are not consciously thinking about it? Does that matter? To answer this question, they used a technique called “backward masking” to probe the brain.

Background information:
Backward masking
is a procedure whereby images of emotions are presented to subjects as they lie in a scanner, but they are presented too quickly to be picked up by the conscious human brain (for 10–30 milliseconds). In addition, another image is presented shortly thereafter for long enough so that people know that they can see it. The human brain needs an image to last for more than 30 ms for the conscious brain to pick it up. We need at least that amount of time for the conscious brain to make an imprint. But what about the unconscious brain?

The finding:
Experimenters found that when fearful facial expressions were shown so that people did not know they had seen them, the amygdala still activated.
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–
13
That is, the amygdala was able to pick up the fear signal unconsciously without the conscious brain knowing anything about it.

Conclusion:
When you surround yourself with fear talk all day, even if you are not consciously listening to it—the news, negative colleagues, minute-to-minute stock market updates—your amygdala is still on overdrive.

In Jack B.’s case, there were a number of unconscious factors that kept his “unconscious fear wheel” spinning. His wife, who became progressively annoyed by him as he did not bring in any money while he was trying to figure his life out, would often be annoyed around him. Even when he was not paying attention to her, his amygdala would have picked this up. Also, he would sometimes try to get his kids ready for school in the morning with the TV on, with news about
crashes, bailouts, the recession, and the dismantled economy. Although he did not pay attention to this, all these factors added up to increase the amygdala activation. As long as the news had between 10–30 ms to register in his brain, that was enough to dominate his unconscious emotional processor. With so much fear and threat bombarding his brain, it did not stand a chance at processing other emotions. They had to wait in line. The power of this registration is illustrated by the following experiment as well.

Concept 3

Aside from picking up fear signals outside of conscious awareness, the amygdala has been shown to activate in people with cortical blindness as well. Cortical blindness occurs when a person is blind and cannot see because the seeing part of the brain (the occipital cortex) is damaged. Even in these blind people, the amygdala will activate to fear.
¹⁴

Conclusion:
Your emotional brain is endowed with a supersensitive fear detector. It does not need your thinking brain to even be involved. This is both an advantage and disadvantage. If you “sense” that something wrong is happening, don’t discount this just because you can’t identify what it is. As long as you are constantly taking in cues from your environment, pay attention to what your brain tells you.

In Jack B.’s case, this meant that he did not have to be looking at something to have it register in his brain. If any part of a fearful image, even in his peripheral vision, got through his pupils and into his brain, that was enough.

So how exactly is fear affecting your thinking and decision making?

Concept 4

Experiments have shown that the amygdala, when it is impacted by fear, is not the only part of the brain that is affected. This is because the amygdala is connected to multiple brain regions. One of these regions is the frontal lobe, where many important (business)
decisions are processed. If the amygdala is activated, this activation affects various regions in the frontal lobe (the prefrontal cortex) and, therefore, affects decision making.

Conclusion:
To lead effectively, leaders need to have sufficient access to their own emotions without disrupting their attention to things at hand. Leaders need to recognize that when they are vulnerable to fear and anxiety, they compromise their own abilities to attend to relevant things. Of interest, as we will see later, are the many positive ways in which we can affect ACC functioning to impact the amygdala.

Thus, for Jack B., all the fears—both conscious and unconscious—activate the amygdala and keep this “unconscious fear wheel” spinning. The impact of this is that it eats up thinking resources in Jack B.’s brain because this amygdala activation disrupts Jack B.’s thinking brain in the frontal lobe. One of the important parts of the frontal lobe—the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—is especially important because a part of it acts as short-term memory and another part as the accountant in the brain. (The accountant calculates risks and benefits of decisions.) So now we have a brilliant entrepreneur who in his baseline state is able to be very creative, but with all these fears impacting his brain, his capacity to remember and make the right decisions about risk are quite compromised.

Concept 5

If you remember clearly, the amygdala detects the significance of emotions in the order of their importance. Usually, because fear is such a strong emotion, it is at the front of the line. However, other emotions may also register first if they are strong or relevant. Studies have shown that the amygdala is an emotional relevance detector rather than just a fear detector.
¹⁵

The question that this creates in the case of Jack B. is, what can he do to displace fear as the primary emotion being processed? That is, he can’t exactly ignore TV entirely, or his wife’s anger for that matter, but he
can
deliberately also expose himself to optimistic and
positive influences on any given day so that his brain has a chance to be relieved and so that his thinking brain can coordinate plans without the “earthquake of the amygdala.” Fear creates amygdala earthquakes; positive emotions calm down the tremors and allow for decisions to be made more effectively.

Summary of the Concepts as They Are Relevant to Coaches, Managers, and Leaders

Fear activates the amygdala: both consciously and outside of consciousness. We need to be aware of this “silent” impact of fear. Here are some specific examples of overt threat that overactivate the amygdala and disrupt decision-making:

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The CEO or senior manager is a bully.
Forcing people to do things under stress may get the job done, but significant thinking resources that take in the whole picture may be missing.

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An employee is having trouble at home or just had a fight with a spouse.
The anxiety will not allow for optimal decision-making.

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There are unreasonable time pressures.
This creates anxiety and is better handled with preventive measures such as time management rather than having to do a task under extreme pressure.

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The employee does not know how to do a task and is afraid of asking someone or being dependent on them.
This can be avoided by encouraging a culture of asking and rewarding this over extreme independence. Interdependence can help productivity.

Because the amygdala is connected to various parts of the brain, impacting the amygdala impacts the entire brain. And when the amygdala is impacted, this in turn impacts memory centers, reward centers, decision-making centers, and attentional and motivation centers in the brain.

Working backward, then, if leaders find themselves “stuck,” even when they are not consciously experiencing fear and anxiety,
they should ask themselves whether unconscious anxiety is blocking their path to success. Here are some specific examples of unconscious threats that overactivate the amygdala and disrupt leaders’ productivity:

• “Am I ever going to be able to sustain my profit margins? What if I lose everything?”

• “I don’t know how I got here.”

• “My business is going to cave under the recession.”

• “The government is not supportive of small business and is giving my money to the poor.”

• “What if I get laid off?”

The clues to unconscious anxiety include the following:

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Avoidance of relevant situations—
When leaders miss meetings, are unable to balance their home and work lives, or show up late for meetings, unconscious anxiety may be at work.

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Isolation—
When leaders work alone all day and have someone else handle the major issues, unconscious anxiety should be suspected.

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Anger—
Many leaders are more comfortable with anger than anxiety, but it is not uncommon that unconscious anxiety manifests as anger.

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Self-limiting beliefs—
When we hear leaders say “I am not lucky,” “I have to have more capital to be successful,” or “How can I succeed when the government is not on my side?” we should examine whether unconscious anxiety is leading to self-limiting beliefs.

In
Chapter 7
, “Coaching Brain Regions,” we examine how brain science uniquely contributes to more effective leadership by focusing on the results of these experiments. From what we know, anxiety can hijack the brain loudly or silently and can cause “earthquakes,” even when you are unaware of it. Looking out for the clues is an important way to intervene. The amygdala is tucked away deep in the brain. It is difficult to access, but because of its connections to conscious pathways, we can use conscious interventions to lower its activation.