Job Description: Efficiency

Click is your brain at its fastest and most efficient. Your brain in Click mode is on cruise, able to handle decisions quickly and with little thought, by accessing all of the rules that you have learned throughout the course of your life. When faced with a choice, Click leaps instantly into action and compares your situation with all of your past experiences and attempts to interpret the new in terms of the old, to develop a rapid response.

In many situations, this is not only efficient, but effective too. Click is your intuition at work. When your current situation is one that you have trained for, and for which your life experiences have prepared you well, Click will cut through all of the detailed information and focus on that which is most relevant. It will create a fast assessment of what is going on and what you should do next. Think of the Click mode as your gut instinct: you rarely know where it comes from, but it feels solid.

Problems arise when you are in a situation for which your past experiences have not prepared you completely. Click needs rules to use, but the rules you have are not quite right for the circumstances. In these cases, Click can let you down badly, making quick judgements that are wrong – sometimes disastrously so. Click has the ability to misread situations, fall into traps, and act on the wrong assessment.

These traps are one of the most important characteristics of the Click mode of thinking. To give it its speed and energy efficiency, Click acquires simple pathways that it likes to follow. Over millions of years of evolution, many such pathways – the thinking equivalent of downhill freeways – have evolved and are pretty much part of the way our brains develop through childhood into our adult state. While these patterns of thought may have served our ancestors well – and may continue to serve us well in certain situations – they represent easy judgements that are often wrong. They are biases in our thinking.

Click's job description may be efficiency, but efficient is not always effective. A Powerhouse needs more resources.

Bubble

Job Description: Rigour

Bubble is not efficient if we think in terms of energy usage and pace of thinking. The Bubble mode works slowly and uses a lot of energy to think through each situation with care. It is the conscious you that does the active thinking about events. Bubble allows you to build on ideas, assess risks and control events. The Bubble mode is analytical, logical and rigorous.

Use Bubble to examine situations that you don't understand, and to evaluate the rapid intuitive response that Click offers, before you act on it. Think of Bubble as Click's more responsible twin– when Click says: ‘This is what to do!’ Bubble responds by saying: ‘Let's think it through carefully first …'

Click often jumps in when Bubble is not paying attention. When you attune your awareness to what is going on, you can sharpen your perception of details and distinctions that Click would miss. This is the strength of the Bubble mode: it has far more information to work from. It is also its weakness, because sometimes Bubble gathers too much information and can become overwhelmed by it. Paralysis by analysis is a symptom of your Bubble mode working too hard at a problem that simply needs Click's simplicity of reasoning.

Bubble thinking takes a lot of effort – literally. It uses a lot of energy and therefore can deplete your mental reserves. When you are engaged in careful Bubble thinking, you need to take breaks and refresh your brain with good food, fresh air and water. For most people, the morning is the best time to engage your Bubble mode, when you are rested and alert. By the end of the day, when you are tired, Bubble starts to give up.

Barack Obama knows how important it is to take the strain off Bubble. He has a very limited range of suit, shirt and tie styles, so that he can take anything out of the wardrobe and know that he will look good. By removing trivial decisions from Bubble's agenda, he can save energy for the big decisions that merit Bubble's full attention.

'You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. You need to routinize yourself.

You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.'

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

Hum

Job Description: Survival Edge

Deep down in the most fundamental part of your brain lies Hum – the mode responsible for keeping you alive and reacting to threats. Hum offers automatic responses to basic stimuli. It is even faster and more efficient than Click, but its domain is limited to physiological responses to stimuli. Hum doesn't deliberate: it reacts. And its reactions trigger changes in our bodies and in the balance of hormones coursing through them. It has four default settings:

Setting 1: Alright

When everything is okay, Hum keeps our bodies ticking over as they should, and completely below the level of our consciousness most of the time. We breathe, we digest, our hearts beat, and our bodies maintain and mend themselves.

Setting 2: Fright

Hum responds to a shock or threat by closing everything down. We become frozen and unable to respond. This is Hum's way of stopping us stepping forward into danger. At times, however, in the modern world, Hum activates our fright setting at the wrong time, rendering us unable to proceed with important tasks.

Setting 3: Fight

Hum sometimes responds to a challenge by preparing for battle. This would be great if a wild animal were threatening your family, but when your boss takes you to task for producing a poor piece of work, or your client suggests that a competitor might do a better job, fighting is the last thing you need to do.

Setting 4: Flight

When Hum thinks it cannot win a fight, it tries to get us away from danger. Setting 2 turned everything off: Settings 3 and 4 turn back on the resources we need for fight or flight. In this case, your heart pounds, your muscles twitch, your mind races and you just want to get out of here. It is Hum that takes over when nerves start to get the better of you before an interview or presentation.

Hum is ever vigilant and that is its strength. It senses danger and prepares you to act. Its weakness is that it takes over so completely that Bubble often finds it hard to re-take control. But if you learn to spot the effects of Hum's intervention, and can mentally step back and relax, and then take a few deep, calming breaths to calm Hum's activity down, then Hum becomes the asset it should be, giving you a survival edge in troubled times.

Effectiveness = Efficiency + Rigour + Survival Edge

There are two other modes that most of us under-use. For full Powerhouse effectiveness, you need to be able to call upon Sigh mode and Squeak mode at the right times.

Sigh

Job Description: Insight

Sigh is your deep processing mode, which is often active in the background when little seems to be going on. Therefore, Sigh is the source of your creativity and your wisdom. You can think of Sigh as your ‘unconscious consciousness' that is good at spotting the subtle, nearly imperceptible signs of change. Sigh is often your true decision-maker, but you need to be able to calm your mind to access Sigh's judgement and creative thinking.

You can access the awesome processing power of your Sigh mode through mindfulness, meditation and reflection. Taking time out of your busy day to consider, think, reflect and even to daydream, can give Sigh the time and space it needs to release the results of its deliberations into your conscious (Bubble mode) mind. This is why we often have creative thoughts first thing in the morning, eating breakfast, in the shower or bath, or walking. In these cases, Click often has nothing to respond to, Bubble is often relaxed, there are no threats for Hum to deal with. With Bubble quiet, it is able to hear the quiet voice of Sigh and bring it to your attention.

In Chapter 1, we saw the importance of making time to see around the next bend. This is the job of Sigh.

Squeak

Job Description: Empathy

Squeak is responsible for the short-term feelings that accompany human experience and affect the way we behave. It is your emotional response to events, to people and to your choices. Consequently, Squeak mode is vital in relationship building, in predicting and accommodating the needs of others and in maintaining your own equilibrium in tough times.

Squeak has a large palette of emotions to work with, from the primary colours of happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise, to more complex compounds, like love, jealousy, guilt, hope, contempt, trust and anticipation. Your ability to detect these in the people around you – called empathy – and to consider their implications for your choices adds a new dimension to your effectiveness when working in social, political and collaborative domains. The workplace is all of these, so Squeak is a vital mode to access.

Summary of the Five Modes

Mode	Job Description	Roles in Effectiveness
Click	Efficiency	Speed of response Access to intuition (deep learning) Decisiveness
Bubble	Rigour	Awareness of detail and subtlety Analysis and logic Control and consideration
Hum	Survival edge	Staying alive and healthy Regulating appetite, sleep and other requirements Reflexive response to threats
Sigh	Insight	Creativity Judgement Spotting signs – the next bend
Squeak	Empathy	Emotion Relationship building Resilience to pressure, adversity and stress

Click, Bubble, Hum, Sigh and Squeak

The Powerhouse Peak

The Powerhouse Peak is characterized by highly focused attention. Here you are feeling fully capable of success and excellence, yet also stretched to the very limit of your experience and expertise. Work at the Powerhouse Peak demands your full attention and, consequently, you have constant awareness of how you are performing. Your perception is honed and you easily slip into flow states where time, discomforts and distractions pass you by. These flow states not only offer peaks in productivity, creativity and clarity of thinking; they are also periods of intense satisfaction, that researcher and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as optimal experiences. We experience subjectively high levels of contentment and pleasure.

Powerhouse performance, under pressure

The Stress of Boredom

Too little stimulation can be as stressful as too much. It also leads to under-performance where, at best, we accept okay as good enough and, at worst, we make mistakes or even create accidents. Too little stimulation can lead to depression.

A Powerhouse needs to take control and you can do this by deliberately putting yourself under pressure. Set demanding time limits that require astonishing speed and focus to achieve, or require exceptional levels of accuracy or quality. Decide to find ways to innovate that will bring improved value or faster completion times. Occupy your brain so that it does not have time to get bored. Turn mundane tasks, like filing or tidying up, into flow state activities by setting aggressive goals that stretch you to your limits and checking on progress constantly, to further tweak your performance.

Operating Under Pressure

In Chapter 8, we will examine how you can build the resilience to cope under pressure. A vital contributor to sustaining Powerhouse effectiveness is your ability to avoid choking under pressure. It can happen to all of us, from the weekend golfer making a mess of their drive on the eighteenth hole and losing the match, to the accomplished salesperson stumbling over their words at a critical sales presentation to a potential client.

How can a Powerhouse avoid choking under pressure? The simple answer is to ensure that what others would perceive as a high-pressure situation – like the ones above – are situations you perceive as ordinary. That is why the top professional golfers don't choke, and why the star salespeople make the perfect pitch even in the face of the biggest opportunities.

They constantly put themselves under pressure so that it becomes familiar and starts to seem ordinary. The more effectively you can simulate pressure in practice and rehearsals, and the more often you expose yourself to high-pressure situations, the more easily you will stay calm under pressure. So gradually increase the pressure you subject yourself to. In your mind, amplify the stakes for your next low pressure meeting, presentation or interview. This will prepare you for when the stakes are genuinely high.

Powerhouse Attitudes