I envy people that have the knack for being do-it yourselfers (DIYers). I happen to be one those people that has painfully learned to stay away from power tools and building products and making things worse by attempting to fix things inside or outside our family’s home. Any task or project beyond the most simple of repairs is handed over to someone else that knows what they are doing.
Our goal as leaders is to strive to be a do-it-yourselfer to help find and master the tools of populating the state of being conscious and intentional and pulling away from our habitual place of unconscious and hopeful.
Our goal as leaders is to strive to be a do-it-yourselfer to help find and master the tools of populating the state of conscious and intentional …
This month’s newsletter draws your attention to the unconscious power of bias. Unconscious bias is the normal state of how we are hard-wired to transmit our thoughts and actions to our emergency 911 centre – the Amygdala. So much of what we do and say stems from this one central organ in our brain that is based on finding rewards for our social behaviour and over-reacting to perceived threats.I also recognize that I do not have the luxury of handing over how I operate as a human being to someone else. I need and want to strive for awareness and understanding as to how I handle my life and what is needed to help me adjust to be a highly functioning human being and leader.
Due to our social nature of humans, the unconscious bias from one individual quickly cascades into the culture of an organization. “Collective unconscious patterns of behaviour have great and often long-lasting influence over organizational decisions and cultural thinking and interaction. These types of patterns perpetuate old, negative norms and keep unhealthy behaviour firmly rooted at the expense of the good of the organization and its employees.”(page 2 – Neurological Lessons)
It is our individual and collective responsibility as leaders to find ways to mitigate unconscious bias by consciously concentrating on the higher level thinking capacity of the Pre-Frontal Cortex. The last page of the article highlights a number of ways we can move to counteract what without rational thought is or normal way of seeing things as they are and not what they need to be.
Recommended Reading:
- Coaching with the Brain and the Mind by David Rock