A Mixed Report Card

Western science, despite all the progress it has made in eighty years since antibiotics were discovered, has a few mysteries left to plumb. One of them is, what is the true role of the unconscious mind, the gut, or intuition in our mental lives? The way I’ve phrased the question suggests the beginning of an answer: what we colloquially call our gut—the place we go when we want to make a decision, a bet, or a guess, without much intellectual support, which most people would agree is roughly equivalent to what we mean by our intuition—is actually our unconscious mind at work.

But, of course, even as we redefine the problem, we make it bigger, because our understanding of what we mean by “unconscious mind” is growing all the time. I’ll discuss more of that in a moment.

First, I should pause here to acknowledge that we’re at the frontiers of Western scientific understanding, and some of the contents of this chapter may well make you uncomfortable. If you’re the sort of person who squirms during a discussion of New Age ideas like mind control, then be warned. This chapter is all about mind control. What I’m going to do is put you in charge of that part of your mental life that you’ve hitherto thought was out of (conscious) reach: intuition. If you think that’s crazy, then skip this chapter and go right to chapter 7, which is all about storytelling, still mind control, but for which there’s a good deal of new scientific evidence, not to mention ancient wisdom.

OK, so let’s get started.

You’ve begun the process of focusing and controlling your emotions for important conversations, meetings, negotiations, presentations, and so on. You’ve learned to harness the power of your unconscious mind to read other people reliably and quickly. You’ve learned how to increase the leadership potential of your voice. And you understand the so-called honest signals that guide social interactions and have learned how to control those in order to be successful.

You’ve taken inventory of your body language, which will have given you your first insights into the unconscious emotions, intents, and attitudes that lie behind that nonverbal communication, especially the habitual postures and gestures of your body. These have developed over time and represent characteristic ways you respond to the world. They are representative of how you think and feel about both good and bad events, stress and joy, opportunities and disasters.

As such, they’re a palimpsest of all your accumulated reactions, decisions, fears, and joys. In a very real sense, your personal history is written in your body and its literal, physical attitude toward the world.

Is your body defiant, or do you stand like a victim? Do you dominate the space or take up as little as possible? Are you a leader or a second in command? Do you effortlessly lead a team to get things done, or do you spend huge amounts of time keeping score of all the little ups and downs you encounter along the way, like a spider weaving memories into her web? All of this shows up in your body, especially as it ages.

That presentation to the world becomes more and more unmistakably you, but it also, naturally enough, comes to limit the possibilities as time goes on.

That’s potentially damaging enough. But when you reflect that most of those attitudes, intents, emotions, and desires that come to shape your body’s typical response to the world are unconscious and shaped by your unconscious memories, then you start to see why it’s so important that you understand what’s going on.

Get to Know Your Gut

It’s time you got to know your gut; that’s the sixth step in this process of mastering your unconscious relationship with the world. There’s a lot of folk wisdom about the gut, and how you should trust it sometimes and be smarter than it at other times, but the reality is far more complicated and surprising.

Let’s talk about your physical gut first. We have something like 100 million neurons in our gut. It’s a little brain, approximately as big as a cat’s. It is the only part of our bodies not completely stage-managed by the big brain in our heads. It’s capable of autonomous action, and that’s a good thing, because it takes care of the all-important task of converting food into the energy that keeps our systems going. Further, it defends our bodies against poison, bad food, and your Aunt Millie’s stew. The question is, what else does it do?

Researchers are just beginning to puzzle out the answer to that question. Heribert Watzke, the author of “The Brain in Your Gut,”, likes to say, “There sleeps a little cat,” about the second brain, because it’s about as powerful as a cat’s brain.¹ He goes on to say, “Our gut has a full-fledged brain.” That little, but full-fledged, cat-sized brain is connected—and this is the important part—to the emotional or limbic system of the big brain. Its chores include chemical and mechanical sensing of food, control of muscle movements like your gag reflex, as well as the hormones and enzymes that actually digest your food. The little brain produces hunger and satiation signals that the big brain happily ignores as you go back for that second helping of stuffing or eat that bowl of ice cream you know you’re going to be wearing on your hips tomorrow. As far as we know now in Western science, the little brain has as its goals, as Watzke says, “the digestion and defense of your body.”

But there’s more going on than that.

The feedback between the two brains—or more specifically among the big brain, little brain, unconscious mind, and conscious mind—works both ways. When we say we have “butterflies” in our stomach, what we’re talking about is the emotional connection between the big brain, its unconscious part, and the little brain. The signals can originate in either place and send terror racing up the vagus nerve from the gut to the unconscious mind, and after that to the conscious mind.

The result is that we can feel fear, for example, before we know it (consciously) or its source. Messages from the gut create emotion, and emotions in the big brain give us indigestion or worse.

So the two brains communicate in a variety of ways that we’re still determining in Western science. Chinese medicine has connected the two brains for centuries via chi, and current research into the functioning of the vagus nerve suggests that it may be one of the prime pathways of communication between the two brains.

Your Chi May Be Telling You Something

Michael Gershon, author of The Second Brain, goes even further. He says, “What the gut does is extremely complicated. It manages digestion, it manages absorption, and it protects you from invasion. Because after all each of us is a hollow human being. The lining of the gut is the surface that separates the outside world from your body.” It’s the barrier between things that will help you and things that will hurt you. More than that, and this is important, Gershon says, “It’s the only part of the body that has independence” from the big brain.²

In effect, Gershon notes, “Evolution decided it works more efficiently to have a set of microprocessors within the gut itself. The brain is like an important CEO who doesn’t like to micromanage.” OK, so why would we humans end up, evolutionarily speaking, as more of an assemblage than a unit, and what does that mean for how well we function?

Which brings us to serotonin. By now, everyone’s familiar with that delightful chemical, the one that makes your brain and, therefore you, happy. But it turns out that making life worthwhile is only one tiny aspect of what serotonin does. Only 2 percent of all the serotonin in the body is to be found in your head, keeping you smiling and helping regulate things like aging, learning, and memory.

The rest of it is in your gut, making you sick. Gershon explains, “It can trigger responses in the gut that are unpleasant. It may be released when the gut is threatened with infection and cause diarrhea or inflammation as it tries to protect against infection. You can think of it as a Roman legion. They went to battle with spears and swords; that’s like the serotonin in the lining of the gut, and they went to battle with shields, in this case represented by serotonin in your gut’s nerve cells. This legion of serotonin fights off infection and foreign invaders. Gershon continues, “Some of the signals that don’t come to consciousness are good and might improve mood. The cross talk between the gut and the brain is important. So maybe information from the gut can help keep the brain on the even keel.” But also, “The gut has a very profound ability to disturb the brain.”

So serotonin, thanks to the differing functions of various parts of the human body, is a two-edged sword, like the ones those Roman legions wielded. It is just like adrenaline, which both energizes and terrifies us, enabling us to do our best, but also making us devilishly uncomfortable at the same time. And, if we can’t control it, that adrenaline in the end undermines us and leads us to do stupid things in front of large audiences. This is all because of the double-edged nature of the way humans respond to the environment and, particularly, stress in the environment.

The little brain in your gut can communicate misery or harmony to the big brain in your head and vice versa. So the old way of thinking, that it’s your job to control your thoughts to help with nerves, say, when you’re about to perform in an important meeting or presentation, is too simplistic. Any sort of intervention has to figure out how to send signals in both directions.

How Your Body Sabotages You at the Wrong Times

What we’re learning is that the human body is an assemblage of systems that have a surprising degree of autonomy from one another, and that are all busy managing various aspects of your mental and physical lives. Nonetheless, they do communicate with one another, and that’s why the human assemblage works pretty well most of the time.

Except when we’re trying to do something difficult, like start a new job demanding all sorts of skills and abilities that we’ve only partly tried out before. Or we’re standing in front of an audience getting ready to give a speech to a group of concerned stakeholders in our organization. Or we’re trying to persuade the executive team to go in a new, relatively untried direction, betting the company on the hope of success. Or, perhaps, we’re in the middle of a job interview for a position we’ve been scheming to get for several years, one that would allow us to try out the vision we have for the future of our industry.

In those instances, the polyglot nature of our bodies betrays us as often as it propels us to victory. The little brain may disable us by sending messages of abject terror shooting up to our big brains, causing embarrassing physical symptoms that become impossible for us—and the others in the room—to ignore. Or the big brain may make a mess of things by going blank at a key moment, causing us to fail to close the deal or wow the crowd when the chance comes.

The bottom line is that if you’re only working on your brain to send signals down to your gut, you’re doing less than half the job necessary for success. And that perhaps is why most efforts to control nerves in that way are so ineffectual.

Instead, you want to start a new, more sophisticated dialogue, not just between brain and body, but between big brain, unconscious and conscious brains, little brain, and body. You want to ensure that your gut is supporting your big brain and body, and the other way around. You want to get all the systems working together to ensure that you’re operating at peak efficiency at those moments when you need to be at the top of your game.

Your Unconscious Mind Is a Mishmash

At the moment, what’s going on? The dialogue you currently have is mostly unmanaged and is a collection of old thoughts, both conscious and unconscious (mostly unconscious) fears, compulsive behavior, things that worked well once upon a time, and so on. It’s a mishmash.

To make matters worse, it’s an unconscious mishmash. Things your parents told you in moments of fatigue and pique, things that you’ve forgotten, shape your thinking along with lessons your body has learned about all the stimuli it has received since the womb. Things you’ve heard, stupid jokes your friends told you when you were eight, movies you’ve seen, books you’ve read, memories of being lost in the dunes during that summer on Nantucket, and so on, all jumble together in your unconscious mind, random data that it has assembled from everything that it has seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt.

The unconscious brain apparently never forgets. Everything it has experienced is set somewhere in the 100 billion or so cells that make up our vast internal universe. But the way the mind works is that things that are repeated are strengthened, making stronger and more numerous synapses, so that the memory becomes more and more important to our overall patterns of thinking. We attach emotions to events to create memories. The more intense and more frequent an event is—as it strikes us—the more it looms large in our mental attic.

So, for example, if your brain links together the experience of choosing up sides in sports encounters in grade school with your popularity in later years, the social dynamics of your relationships with your colleagues at work, and your divorce, you may have a significant and largely unconscious set of beliefs about your ability to manage a team that kick into place when you get that new promotion. You may find yourself self-sabotaging without knowing why.

Thanks to the usual unavailability of the unconscious sources of most of our attitudes and beliefs, we may have very strongly held feelings that hold us back without knowing the reason. If we knew the reason, we might be surprised or even appalled.

The reality is that your conscious mind is beset by essentially random directives from your unconscious mind, some of which help you succeed in your larger purposes in life and most of which don’t.³

Beware Lack of Control

When you’re not in control of those random directives from your unconscious mind, you risk ineffectiveness. I once saw the magic act of Penn and Teller, two accomplished magicians. Penn is the talkative one, and Teller is largely silent. Penn keeps up a running commentary designed to distract and bemuse the audience while they both perform the magic tricks.

I was astonished to see that the talkative one, Penn, had a bad case of “happy feet.” He had so much energy that he was wandering all over the stage randomly while chattering away. The random movement of his feet was his method of discharging the adrenaline-induced energy that his body was generating.

The result was so distracting, though, that I found myself unable to attend to his patter or even the magic tricks with any real pleasure. Nonetheless, he managed to hold his audience reasonably well until he and Teller performed an unpleasant trick that involved apparently putting a live rabbit through a wood chipper. He lost his audience then and never got it back, making it clear that the bond was weak from the start, partly because of those irritating happy feet. Had he bonded strongly with the audience from the start, the relationship would have survived the murder of rabbits.

It’s impossible to believe that a successful professional like Penn was not aware of his motion around the stage. I’m forced to conclude that he was simply unable to control it, and that lack of control was fatal for the success of the show.

He was even heckled by one or two audience members and approached by at least one after the show, who gave him a lecture on the mistreatment of animals. Because he had not related effectively to the audience, thus building trust, when the moment of truth came, the audience didn’t trust him.

Would an Athlete Train This Way?

When you don’t bring your unconscious mind under control, you let the little cat-sized brain in your gut run the show. You let patterns and experiences from your past dictate your action in the present. It’s as if an athlete training for a big race found herself occasionally running sideways or flailing her arms in random ways, just because she did that once as a kid to avoid something scary. If you’re just running in a friendly competition, your occasionally bizarre performance won’t matter much. But if you suddenly find yourself in the Olympics, the subtleties matter enormously. In that rare circle where hundredths of a second make the difference between the winning platform and a footnote, everything matters, especially your unconscious mind.

The same is true in leadership. You can get away with a lot when the stakes are low. But as you rise through the ranks, your hostility toward certain kinds of people, your tendency to procrastinate, your idea that people should be able to read your mind, or any one of a thousand other counterproductive beliefs I’ve seen managers act on will start to damage your ability to get the job done.

The higher up you go, the more certain self-destructive behaviors matter, and the more they’ll be held against you. Plenty of people, alas, have affairs, because they’re narcissists whose egos need constant feeding, but when you’re running for president, it makes the news. Similarly, the bigger the P&L you manage, any less-than-optimal behavior patterns are more subject to scrutiny.

What are the options open to you if you discover that your 360-degree evaluation points out some uncomfortable truths you’ve been suppressing for too long? You can try to change your behavior, you can get therapy and hope that will change your behavior, or you can deny that there’s any problem and keep doing the same things with the same people and hope for different results.

Just changing behavior is difficult, and you’re liable to relapse. Therapy is time consuming, expensive, and the results are mixed. And denial doesn’t work unless you’re lucky for the rest of your life.

There’s an Alternative to Therapy

There is another way. The good news is that you can take charge of all your mental systems and learn to manage your unconscious mind as well as the mind in your gut and your conscious mind. It takes some time, but it will allow you to shed a good deal of the misinformation sloshing around in your head and body currently and become a better-focused human dynamo capable of sustained achievement. Athletes have been harnessing a little bit of the power of their unconscious minds by practicing mental imaging of their races and games for many years. The results are extraordinary, beginning with the gold medal counts the Soviets achieved back in the era of the Cold War and spreading around the world in subsequent years.⁴

Now it’s time for the rest of us to get with the program, clean up our mental attics, and start living up to our true potential. This three-step process takes about three to four weeks to show results at first, if you really push yourself, and up to three months, if you’re slower. After that, all it takes is maintenance.

The process begins with identifying the irrational fears, beliefs, and habits that are getting in the way of your performance in a particular area. Then, you develop the new dialogues that you need to replace the old fixations. Finally, you implement the new thinking. I’ll describe each step in more detail later in the chapter.

First, Identify Your Fears

OK, let’s start the cure. First, you need to identify whatever is holding you back. Let’s take the example of public speaking, because it’s such a common fear. (I’ll talk more about how to conquer this common fear in the field notes at the end of this chapter.) Let’s say that you’ve been promoted to vice president in your organization, and the position requires that you give regular speeches to a wide variety of stakeholders. You’re going to have to speak about once a week to crowds of one hundred or more at a pop.

The problem is that the prospect terrifies you. You’re OK talking to your team or your colleagues in small numbers on a regular basis, sitting around a table. You see those as less formal, more casual events, part of everyday work, not a speech. It’s something about the idea of a speech that causes you to feel faint and have visions of cardiac arrest.

But what causes that reaction to giving a speech? Is it the impression you have that a speech is more formal? Is it that you’re talking to strangers for the most part? Is it some idea that a speech operates under different rules, rules you never learned very well because you didn’t pay close attention in that communications course in college? In fact, you failed it, and the shame lingers on.

You need to figure out as precisely as you can what the fear is, what the belief is that is holding you back. This is not an easy task. You have to probe your fear as you would probe an infected wound. It hurts. It’s not pleasant. You won’t want to go there. But go there you must. Figure it out. Be honest with yourself, look as deep as you can, and get as close to the bottom of it that you can.

Then state your fear as clearly as possible: “I get nervous when I have to speak to strangers because I’m afraid they’re judging me like that popular clique of students did, snickering at me and making fun of me when I gave that stupid speech about bees in the sixth grade.”

Once you’ve identified the fear as clearly as you can, let it sit for a day or two. Writing it down helps. Come back and visit it at least a couple of times over a twenty-four-hour period. See if it still hurts.

If you’ve followed the steps in this book, then you’ve already strengthened your connection to your unconscious mind considerably. You’ve gotten used to listening to it. Now, you need to listen very carefully to your unconscious mind and hear if it’s telling you that this is the right fear. If it is, you’ll know it. It will resonate with your unconscious mind.

Second, Develop the Antidote

Once you’ve got the fear clearly stated and you’re satisfied that it’s as close as you’re going to get, then work on finding the countervailing positive statement. Perhaps it’s this: “I get excited when I speak to strangers because it’s a wonderful opportunity to make new friends and spread the word about my cause. It’s fun!”

There are several key points to keep in mind. The unconscious isn’t very good with negative thinking, so state everything in a positive way. Avoid negative words and negative phrasing. Don’t say, “I don’t get nervous when I speak to strangers,” because your unconscious will hear “nervous” and that will reinforce the nervousness you already have. The neurons already in place will be reinforced. Instead say, “I get excited …”

Next, make sure you state the positive opposite emotion or attitude to your fear as precisely as possible. You’re creating a smart bullet to target the fear, and you want to take it out precisely. So make the correspondence to your fear as exact as possible, but phrased as a positive alternative.

Finally, make it as simple as possible, but still comprising a full sentence with a subject and a verb. As you’ll see when I discuss implementation, you’re going to be intimately living with this sentence for quite a while, so simplicity is a virtue.

Write it down, let it sit for at least twenty-four hours, and come back to it a few times to check to make sure it still works. Imagine if this sentence were true. Would your issue go away? Ask yourself that question, and let your unconscious mind answer it.

Once you’re sure you’ve got your antidote, your mantra, you’re ready for implementation.

Third, Change Your Beliefs, Change the World

I am not a believer in that mumbo-jumbo from The Secret that says if you just believe that a million dollars will manifest itself in your pocket, it will.⁵ But I do think that if you believe that you are a follower, you will always be treated like one. Because you will stand, walk, and speak like a follower. If you believe that you’re a leader, you’ll get a chance to lead. Not because of magic, but because you’ll send out unconscious signals that will tell the rest of the world what to think about you.

If you are nervous going into a meeting of powerful people, that’s because you don’t believe, at some level, that you belong there. The only way to take charge in that case is to change your belief, so that you don’t telegraph to everyone else that you are not worthy of notice.

For the most part, we accept what other people tell us about themselves. We don’t have time for the alternative. We especially accept what other people’s unconscious minds telegraph about themselves to our unconscious minds, because we’re not even aware that we have taken it on board.

So how do you do it? How do you turn yourself into a fearless, positive, neurosis-free go-getter? The implementation is quite simple, but it takes discipline and patience. Remember that you’re replacing synapses that have been firing for a long time, perhaps years, with varying degrees of intensity, and you are now replacing those connections with new ones. Persistence and patience will replace old trauma, but it will take time.

So it’s time to start a new dialogue with your unconscious, one that tells your unconscious that actually you are a confident public speaker (“I get excited when I speak to strangers because it’s a wonderful opportunity to make new friends and spread the word about my cause. It’s fun!”). Or perhaps one that tells your unconscious mind what a relaxed, easy-going, natural-born leader you are. Something like, “I’m comfortable wielding power, and I do it with ease.” Or, one that expresses your natural ability to lead on the fly: “I naturally take charge of the room when I go into a meeting.” Whatever fits you and your circumstances best and most specifically.

You’re going to say this line to yourself every chance you get, but especially when you’re falling asleep, waking up, or having doubts or worries about your leadership capacity. Most especially, you’re going to say it when the old doubts, fears, and issues start themselves up in your mind. Every single time a negative thought creeps into your mind, it’s time to state your positive alternative. Let the line become your mantra. Say it (to yourself) hundreds of times a day if necessary.

Do this for three weeks, and you’ll find yourself becoming more authoritative, confident, or whatever it is you’ve worked on. In three months, you’ll find that you are effortlessly facing new situations that would have slowed you down or paralyzed you in the past. How quickly you proceed will be determined by how often you say your mantra and how often you neutralize the negative thoughts as they come up.

Here are a few pointers. First, stay patient and calm. Don’t argue with your unconscious. Just simply repeat your mantra every time a negative thought along those lines bubbles up into your conscious mind.

Second, don’t forget to say your mantra with especial dedication, over and over again, when you’re falling asleep or if you wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. It’s now a great opportunity for you to make quick progress. Just keep repeating that mantra until you fall asleep, like counting sheep.

Third, keep doing it even though you won’t see much happening at first. Changing fundamental attitudes like this takes time. Changing unconscious attitudes takes time. Changing fundamental unconscious attitudes takes the most time.

Stay patient, stay focused, stay calm, and keep talking to yourself. That’s all you have to do. You’re replacing a negative doom-loop thought process with a virtuous, positive one.

How and why does this work? You’ve developed your own attitudes toward yourself and what you’re capable of through hundreds of significant moments in your life—when you were picked or not picked for the team, when someone teased you, or you won a game, when you were singled out for praise or blame, and on and on. Each of these moments begins to contribute to a self-image that coalesces around what you think you’re capable of over the years.

You’ve hard-wired your unconscious mind to think about yourself in a certain way. Now, you’re simply rewiring your mind. It’s not difficult to do; it just takes persistence.

It’s Not Magic; It’s an Unconscious Dialogue

Next, there’s the external validation. Let’s say you’re working on a leadership mantra. As soon as the mantra starts to work and you start to notch some wins, you’ll start to get positive emotional reinforcement for what’s happening. So each time you come up winning, you stand a little straighter, walk a little more confidently, look people in the eye with more authority. Most importantly, your brain begins to strengthen the positive neural connections and weaken the negative ones. You become what you tell yourself you are.

Or, there’s the alternative. Each time you lose, the opposite happens. Eventually, either way, you define a pattern, and that’s what you believe. Which would you rather have your unconscious mind reinforcing? Which would you rather be learning in every fiber of your being?

What happens is that your unconscious mind, which is faster and more powerful than your conscious mind, determines your emotional state. Those attitudes, intents, and emotions get expressed in your physical gestures. And those gestures are what other people read to figure you out. You get constant reinforcement from the people around you based on what you’re emoting as to what’s possible for you to achieve from your own mind.

When your mother told you to stand up straight and look people in the eye, she wasn’t wrong. It’s just that it’s impossible to follow that advice, because within seconds your conscious mind will move on to something else, and your body will go back to the unconscious expression of your true feelings. You’re stuck with the pattern you’ve developed over many years of experience.

The good news is that you can change the pattern. Now, you get to pick the pattern that you want. So make it one that helps you to succeed. If you do nothing, then you’ll end up with the self-description that is the sum total of everything that’s gone right and wrong in your life.

Don’t leave it up to chance like that. Take charge of your inner leadership life. Tell yourself the story that you want to live. As you develop a new self-story, you’ll find that people begin to react to you differently. With your new belief will come a new way of interacting with the world, and that’s necessary groundwork for becoming a more powerful leader. Not through any magic, but because you are carving a new way through human relations. This work will set the stage for the essential work on the voice that will help you seal the deal with your leadership.

I’ve seen this process succeed over and over with clients as they begin to change the thousand little messages they send out every day to their family, friends, and colleagues that define who they are among their fellows. All it takes is positive self-talk, lots and lots of positive self-talk. Be patient. It takes time to talk yourself into a new way of being.