The Truth About Power Via Margot Robbie

And no one is left unscathed.  It exploits everyone.

Everyone wants to live life like the movies.  They want the perfect everything - perfect body, perfect partner, coolest friends and greatest experiences, all as easily as they seem to come on the silver screen.

Of course, nothing on the silver screen is as simple as it looks.  Film making takes a great deal of preparation, logistics, communication, editing, financing and above all, discipline.

The best film makers don't do what they do for the money and glamour it brings any more than the best politicians are about power and fame.  They have a story to tell or a vision to implement.  They may have fun at what they do, they may indulge in some of the benefits that come from their position, but for the true leaders, what they get never replaces what they leave behind.

Because no one gets everything they want; such is not sustainable and never will be.

Power has to be about balance, as does resource access; when it's not, you're just precipitating a fall. 

Great Leaders Decide With Their Guts, Not Just Their Brains (By Mark C. Crowley)

The limbic centre of our brain is ancient; it is the repository for both genetic memory (fear the dark, fear snakes) and learned experiences.  The limbic system allows us to react to stimuli by pulling out related memories from the hypothalamus and filtering them through the amygdala, centre for reactive emotions.  If you had a bad experience with a tattooed man in your past and meet someone new with tattoos, it's this process that will give you a negative bias.  It's an incredibly useful tool, but it doesn't allow us to overcome reactive urges - that's where the neocortex comes in.

 

The neocortex permits us to apply executive function, overriding instinct, take risks, innovate.  This is the part of our noggin that humans have to a larger degree than other species and has allowed for social development, science, etc. 

 

The best decisions, of course, are made through a balanced approach of reaction and foresight.  It's a tricky line to walk, but one we can do when we do it consciously.

 

Great Leaders Decide With Their Guts, Not Just Their Brains

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Mark C. Crowley

 

“Dig up all the information you can, then go with your instincts. We all have a certain intuition, and the older we get, the more we trust it… I use my intellect to inform my instinct. Then I use my instinct to test all this data. ‘Hey, instinct, does this sound right? Does it smell right, feel right, fit right?

General Colin Powell

 

 

The idea of using intuition when making important decisions is greatly frowned upon in business.

We’ve been taught that conscious reasoning alone is the sure-fire way of choosing the best course of action, and that our intuition is impulsive and inherently misguiding. Stand up in a meeting and say, “I feel this is the right decision even though the financials don’t fully back me up,“ and expect an immediate backlash.

 

While we’ve all learned to be publicly dismissive about intuition, I’m absolutely certain you can quickly recall an experience when an inner voice steered you away from a disastrous outcome. Is it logical that this voice doesn’t also speak up when workplace dilemmas need resolution? Is that inner guidance untrustworthy in our jobs but fully reliable in our personal lives?

 

I’m guessing you have a hunch on the answers to both these questions, but if your mind isn’t yet fully able to reconcile the conflict, I have good news. Science is coming to your aid.

 

According to Dr. Rollin McCraty, Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, human intuition – flashes of insight that can’t be judged by reasoning – is real. More importantly, there’s compelling new research that proves leaders who act on their intuition achieve greater success.

 

Through the research performed by HeartMath and other organizations, we now know there are three unique types of intuition:

 

(1) Implicit Knowledge: We learn something and forget we learned it. While we’re taking a shower or are out for a run, it sneaks up from our unconscious into our conscious. Voila, the insight we need in the moment pops into our heads. About 95% of what’s written about intuition relates to “implicit knowledge.”

 

(2) Energetic Sensitivity: Our nervous system literally is sensitive to environmental signals (it’s like a big antenna). Psychologist, Gary Klein, tells the story of a team of fire fighters that entered a house where the kitchen was ablaze. While hosing down the fire, the commander suddenly heard himself yell, “Let’s get out of here!” without knowing why. The kitchen floor collapsed immediately after– but not before all firefighters escaped. Only after the experience did the captain recall the impressions that prompted his “sixth sense of danger.” The fire had gotten unusually hot and quiet, and his intuition discerned it.

 

(3) Non-Local Intuition: “Everyone has an experience of it,” says McCraty. “You drive down a road you travel all the time and have the sudden impulse to slow down. As you round the corner, you see a small child in the street or an accident that just has happened. In situations like these, the heart senses the nature of events ahead of time, before they actually occur…. This intuition stuff about unknown future events that you cannot explain through implicit learning is nevertheless real. The central core of every religion on the planet is the heart is our primary access point to wisdom and courage. Science is now supporting what’s always been believed.”

 

For many years, the Australian Graduate School Of Entrepreneurship has been studying repeat entrepreneurs, people with long careers who’ve built businesses multiple times with great success.

In looking for common characteristics, the researchers discovered something amazing – and especially useful for business leaders. 80% of the entrepreneurs acknowledged relying on their intuition when making important decisions. When weighing their options, in other words, they relied on their cognitive capacities and intuitive capacities – heart and mind.

 

In his recent book, Onward, Starbucks CEO and hugely successful entrepreneur, Howard Schultz, admits to routinely consulting his intuition and to taking frequent action on the guidance it gives him. Overruling financial analysis that strongly panned both these ideas, Schultz chose to remove a very popular breakfast item from the menu and to close all Starbucks’ stores for three hours of employee training. Had he relied on his mind alone to guide these actions, he never would have pursued them. Perhaps not coincidentally, Starbucks’ stock is up 400% over the past decade while the S & P 500 average return is a mere 60%.

 

As Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast And Slow, making important decisions tied to intuition alone can prove disastrous. But what science now has proved is that we have two sources of human intelligence, and letting them both have a say is a very wise move.

Building the Social Animal: Society, Politics and the Mental Health Solution

 “I think we need to understand where we’re going with those programs and whether or not we have solutions — programs that actually bring about solutions.” – Senator Vern White

In raising mental health (phrased another way, cognitive function) as a top social priority, White hits the nail squarely on the head.  As I’ll get to later, I think a proper understanding of what “mental health” actually means and what role cognitive function plays in social dynamics will enable us to bridge a number of social inequity barriers and inefficiency gaps, including the challenges facing First Nations.  Ironically enough, as economic growth is seen as the biggest factor in determining social and individual success, I believe that our challenge and our promise are both a reflection of neurological innovation.

There's a general rule that application always lags behind innovation; you get a new computer model before you've mastered how to use the last one, then there's a mobile device, etc.  When it comes to practical usage of what’s new, we're always playing catch-up (“you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is simply a colloquial description of the cons of myelination).  This is as true in biology as it is in technology, even moreso in a social context.  The fine-motor capacity of our bodies lags behind the demands put on it; we simply aren’t designed for long stints of sitting at desks or chronic keyboard use, yet that’s what society demands of us.

We have only just begun to fathom the depth of what this principle means to society and individual biology.  One quick example – you don't find ulcers in zebras because zebras don’t face chronic stress; they face biochemical stress in short stints, after which they are either dead or free to live another day.  Humans, on the other hand, are constantly hitting the stress button; in gridlock, in meeting work deadlines, in facing the schoolyard bully or the micro-managing boss, in domestic challenges, etc.  The closest equivalent to the level of chronic stress our species faces would be small, skittish creatures that exist in a constant state of reactive-readiness to respond to predation.  These aren't species that tend to live very long lives.

Thanks to the collective benefits of society (healthcare and security in place of aggressiveness/defensiveness), humans are living increasingly long lives and being exposed to an ever-increasing amount of stressors.  These come in both physical (keyboards, cramped subways, isolation through living in single-family dwellings, long work days spent sitting, shifts that interfere with biological rhythms of sleep and eating, etc.) and less apparent but no less impactful, psychological (email flow, traffic jams, cubicle farms, micro-management, stigma) forms.

In the grandest of ironies, much of the issues that plague society, ranging from physical diseases like asthma, repetitive stress injury and cancers are caused or exacerbated by the conditions of society.  As in all things, the benefits of social living are offset by its negative consequences.  While our bodies are designed for certain degrees of social functioning – hands designed for tool use, parts of our brain built for tool design, throats designed for speech and minds capable of fabricating language), the innovations of society are always a couple steps ahead of our biological, neurological capacity to adapt.

Where this conflict (the growth and well-being of society vs the growth and well-being of the individual) stems from is neuro-biology.  The reason we are social creatures at all is due to the development of the prefrontal cortex.  The prefrontal, or “neo” cortex is the part of our brain responsible for, among other things, planning and executive function.  The reason that we have more individualized interests is due to our reactive, limbic mind that encourages us to go for instant gratification regardless of longer-term consequence.

I cannot over-emphasize how pervasive this simple biological reality is in our daily lives, or the general functioning of society.  Even political, ideological differences seem to be social manifestations of these two basic drives – individual interest vs. collective interest, or biological evolution vs social evolution.

Think about it - the neo-cortex is the root of executive functioning (central coordination) and pro-social behaviour (the collective benefit of the whole).  Does that not sound like the basic premise of the ideological Left?  The left wants a solid social safety net managed by a strong, central government that inevitably bleeds away from individual (provincial, municipal, agency, individual) independence.  It’s growth through collaboration.

On the other hand, the limbic system is all about individual strength and the ability to react required when there is no social safety net - does that not sound like the decentralized, individual strength and independence that forms the basis of Right-Wing thought?  The Right is all about individual success stemming from competition.

We are social creatures – the interconnectivity of humanity is such that, thrown out into the wild, most people would be unable to survive independently (and note the correlation between support for individualism and independence and rural living vs. support for specialization and social opportunity in urban environments).  Yet, the pressures of fully-integrated social living are more than we can handle; individually, we suffer from an increasing series of physical and psychologically-related stress factors and socially, we face systematic inequity. 

What happens in society is the same thing that happens when the body faces any stress, be it extreme temperatures or the threat of physical danger; we ramp up the appropriate internal system, taking energy away from others to do so. In society, the greater the duress we face, the greater the internal inequity we face.  You can see it happening now, right here in Canada – the polarization of our politics and the disappearance of the middle class are an exact parallel to physiological responses to stress, with “trouble lapping at our shores” standing in for a hungry lion.  The “cold war” was aptly names for reasons we didn’t fully understand at the time.

When I look at this whole process from the viewpoint of evolution, it’s fascinating – watching the disparate elements of humanity become increasingly integrated is like watching how complex organs like an eye or complex internal systems like the respiratory system developed in real-time.  In fits and spurts, we are building a social ecology, an organism that is greater than the sum of its parts.

At the same time, the practical reality is that the process is subjecting us to micro and macro stresses that are not conducive to quality-of-life.   On the individual level, we have depression, anxiety, road rage and the whole suite of repetitive stress injuries.  On the macro level, we have the problems facing First Nation communities and the increasing likelihood of war with Iran, the isolation of North Korea or the return of fascism in Europe.

Where we are is where we are – the human evolutionary trend is leading towards increased socialization and inter-dependence.  Our evolving consciousness of this fact is only going to speed up the process.  At the same time, we simply aren’t ready to be wholly integrated as a society; we need individual capacity to succeed at both the psychological and physical level.  So, then – what do we do?

As in all things in life, the solution is to be found not in the political left or in the political right, but through the balance of each (which is probably why duality and balance has been such a consistent theme in societies the world over, my favourite example being Lao-tzu’s Tao-te-Ching).  We need both the left AND the right – the two inform each other and, in so doing, eventually arise at the compromises that find the balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.

Which brings us back to why a better understanding of mental health is necessary for a properly functioning society.  Just as understanding the why behind a phobia or a craving makes them easier to manage, understanding the cognitive motivation behind everything we do will enable us to do it better.

Which is also why there’s a growing trend towards both social collaboration and a focus on mental health; we need both.  Consciously, we can get there faster, more efficiently.  Having spoken to politicians, social and business leaders representing multiple facets of society, I can say with confidence that the majority of our leaders already have the right intent – all they need to do is follow-through.