Understanding the People You Lead and Why They Do What They Do the Way They Do
Understanding the People You Lead and Why They Do What They Do the Way They Do
This is about how human beings operate themselves and how this understanding opens the door to being able to make positive changes in our lives.
Every human being is unique and complex, but we all use the same basic system for making ourselves do what we do. We all stand on our hind legs. We all have a head on top of our bodies. And we all have the ability to use our senses and to think, feel, and act.
You are a sensing machine
Every minute of every day you are using your senses to connect with the world around you. You are constantly touching, looking, listening, smelling, and tasting to keep you in touch with the world around you.
Then, once your senses pick up on something they consider worthy of your attention they send a message to your brain saying something like, “Look at this,” or “this smell is interesting” or “take note that sounded dangerous.”
You think to interpret and decide
When a message from your senses arrives in your brain it usually goes first to your memory.
The message will arrive with questions like, “What’s this” and “have we encountered something like this before?”
If, for instance, your memory recognizes that you are smelling the fine aroma of freshly baked bread and you have not yet had your breakfast, it will likely send messages to other parts of your body saying, “This smells like really tasty bread. We have greatly enjoyed eating freshly baked bread in the past. We should go into the shop immediately and buy some bread..”
Your thoughts about what you are about to do generate feelings that empower you
Once you decide what to do, for instance, go into the shop and buy some bread, feelings arise based on your expectations about what you are about to experience. In this case, you are expecting to feel the enjoyment of eating freshly baked bread. The expectation of an enjoyable experience sends a buzz of energy coursing through your being.
You power of your actions is dictated by the strength of your feelings
As you are also feeling hungry, it is likely that these feelings will cause you to hurry into the shop to buy the bread. If you were not feeling so hungry you might decide to delay your purchase until later in the day.
This is how you operate yourself
You use this simple system all the time:
you sense,
you think, or interpret what you have sensed,
you feel,
you act.
Let’s look at an example of a situation where anxiety might influence your behavior.
Situations like this can make us feel anxious
Imagine you are attending a meeting of your peers at work. You walk into the conference room and the first person you notice is a colleague who is arrogant and with whom you have a difficult relationship.
The moment you set eyes on your colleague your memory brings to mind the fraught conversation you had yesterday. You instantly start to feel anxious about how they will greet you. As a result, you approach them hesitantly. The smile on your face is nervous. Your thoughts and feelings create the outcome - your conversation is difficult.
Good news! You can change your behavior and your outcomes
You do not have to be the victim of your own memories. Memories are what happened in the past, they often influence you by causing habitual behavior, but they do not have to influence your life. Memories will only influence your present and your future if you allow them to.
At stage 2 of your operating procedure, you can make a conscious decision about the outcome you want from any situation. Let’s look at your peer group meeting in a different way.
You enter the room and immediately notice the colleague with whom you had a difficult conversation yesterday.
You make a conscious decision that you want to build a good relationship with this colleague. You decide to lead the way to a better relationship.
As you make the decision that you will take responsibility for building a good relationship, you notice that you feel empowered by your decisiveness and your desire to be the leader in this situation.
You stride forward with a smile on your face and your hand outstretched in greeting.
Should you behave like this the likelihood is that the other person will be surprised and then pleased, because they too probably did not want an awkward situation to develop.
Recognize that you usually have the power to control your situations
You will occasionally be the victim of a situation that is outside of your control, but such events are remarkably rare. Most of the time you can control the situations you encounter simply by taking charge of your mind.
“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” Marcus Aurelius, Roman philosopher and Emperor.
If you go on doing what you’re doing now nothing will change
If there is anything about your life that dissatisfies you or with which you are not happy it is up to you to decide to change that aspect of your life. No one else can do it for you.
You just have to decide what you want and then take action to make the changes necessary to achieve what you want.
Your job as a leader of others is to help them decide what they want and then to work out what they have to do to get what they want.
Your job as the leader of your own life is to decide what you want and then work out what you have to do to achieve your objective. Then you just have to do it.