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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
'Fascinating. Gomes provides a practical guide with an analysis of our mindset and the means to grow and strengthen it.' The Financial Times 'Each chapter angles the mirror to your face slightly differently, allowing you to pause, reflect and reposition your mindset to succeed.' Will Page, author of Pivot and former Chief Economist of Spotify 'Leading in a Non-linear World is a tour de force, drawing on the latest science of self-awareness to put forward clear-eyed, practical advice for how to live and lead in the 21st century.' Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London 'A fabulous and provocative read from one of our most inspirational thinkers on business and leadership.' Chris Hirst, Author of No Bullsh*t Leadership 'Leading in a Non-Linear World enables us to refresh our understanding of the mindset and shifts the paradigm to meet new and unforeseen challenges. Bravo.' Amy Herman, bestselling author of Fixed and Visual Intelligence Unlock the full potential of your organization in a rapidly transforming world with this explosive resource Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic and Innovation Mindsets for the Future, leads readers through a groundbreaking set of science-based strategies to help them face rising demand, uncertainty and change posed by disruptive technologies and seismic shifts in globalisation. The book shows how our mindset, more than our knowledge and expertise, has the potential to be our greatest asset in facing the future. Jean Gomes reviews the latest brain research revealing that our mindset is the interplay of feeling, thinking, and seeing, and how we can build it to significantly increase our wellbeing and performance. For over 30 years Jean Gomes has worked with many of the world's most successful leaders in the corporate and sporting world, helping them to harness the emerging science of mindset. His clients include Warner Music, Nike, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, eBay, Coca-Cola, UK Sport, Condé Nast, Microsoft, Manchester City Football Club and BMW. He is co-author of the New York Times best seller; The Way We're Working Isn't Working and the founder and CEO of the research-based consultancy, Outside. Leading in a Non-Linear World provides readers with a new science-based definition of mindset and the tools to: * Build and strengthen their mindset * Increase their sustainability and wellbeing * Understand and build the ultimate strategic mindset * Learn how to create the mindset that's foundational to the success of the world's fastest growing companies * How to build an open mindset that allows leaders to create flexible, adaptive cultures capable of naturally responding to change Perfect for CEOs, Chief Innovation Officers, business leaders, digital officers, and anyone in a managerial or supervisory role, Leading in a Non-Linear World shows leaders how to shift their thinking and realize explosive growth in a world that demands nothing less.
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Seitenzahl: 371
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
PART 1: THE NEW SCIENCE OF MINDSET AND SELF-AWARENESS
CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS MINDSET?
CREATING A BIGGER INNER WORLD
CHAPTER 2: CONSCIOUSNESSES – OUR SENSE OF SELF
THE PREDICTING BRAIN
CHAPTER 3: WHAT YOUR BODY IS TELLING YOU
EMPATHY AND INTEROCEPTION
CHAPTER 4: RETHINKING EMOTIONS
CLASSICAL VS CONSTRUCTED VIEWS OF EMOTIONS
THE VALUE OF EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY
WHAT ARE POSITIVE EMOTIONS FOR?
THINKING MORE CLEARLY WITH META EMOTION
CHAPTER 5: THINK – THE ASSUMPTIONS THAT DEFINE US
WHAT WE BELIEVE INFLUENCES OBJECTIVE REALITY
ASSUMPTION BUSTING – DEEP DISRUPTIVE THINKING
HOW TO BUILD AN ASSUMPTION-BUSTING LOG
THE ART OF ASKING AND BEING ASKED DISRUPTIVE QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 6: SEE – THE FRAMES WE HOLD
WE SEE WHAT ONCE WAS
DO WE SEE WHAT WE FEEL?
THE FRAMES WE HOLD
RECONCILING VS MANAGING PARADOXES
REIMAGINE
ARE YOU THINKING OR SEEING?
CHAPTER 7: METACOGNITION – STRATEGIC SELF-AWARENESS
IMPROVING METACOGNITION
CHAPTER 8: HOW TO BUILD A MINDSET
1. WHAT DO YOU
REALLY
WANT?
2. WHAT ARE YOU SOLVING FOR?
3. WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS TELLING YOU?
4. REFRAME TO FEEL/THINK/SEE/ACT DIFFERENTLY
TWO KEYS TO STRENGTHENING SELF-AWARENESS
CHAPTER 9: MINDSET-BUILDING EXPERIMENTS
THE BODY SCAN
MEASURE YOUR INTEROCEPTIVE ACCURACY
KEEP A PERSONAL ASSUMPTION LOG
WALKING MEETINGS
SWITCHING ON DIVERGENT THINKING
FOCUSED BREATHING
HAVE A DOUBTFUL 30 MINUTES
SPEND TIME WITH PEOPLE UNLIKE YOU
EMOTIONAL JUDGEMENT
RETHINKING CONFLICT
IMPROVING EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY
MEET YOUR 80-YEAR-OLD SELF
PART 2: BUILDING MINDSETS FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK AND LIFE
CHAPTER 10: A MORE HUMAN MINDSET – ALIVE, OPEN, AND CONNECTED
THE NEGATIVE NORMAL
THE AGE OF AUTOPILOT
DEPLETED, DEFENSIVE, DISCONNECTED
THE KNOWING–DOING GAP
NUMBNESS
INSUFFICIENT PURPOSE
BREAKING THE INTELLIGENCE TRAP
RECOGNISING RUMINATION
HOW CAN YOU FIND THE BLIND SPOT?
AN EXPERIMENT IN BUILDING RADICAL SELF-AWARENESS
CHAPTER 11: FUTURE NOW – THE ULTIMATE STRATEGIC MINDSET
THE ENTROPY PROBLEM
THE FATAL (BASELINE) ASSUMPTION
THE VALUE TRILEMMA
THE PAST PRESENT ORGANISATION: 95/5 FOCUS
THE FUTURE NOW ORGANISATION
CREATING A SYMBIOSIS WITH THE FUTURE
BREAKING THE IMMEDIACY CYCLE
HOW DOES IT
FEEL
TO BE A FUTURE NOW ORGANISATION?
ALWAYS DAY ONE: THE PERPETUAL ASSUMPTION
70/30: KNOWING HOW TO DISTINGUISH RISK AND UNCERTAINTY
DISCERNING FOUR HORIZONS OF OPPORTUNITY
HORIZON 4 – WHAT IGNORANCE ARE WE (INTENTIONALLY) GENERATING?
A NORTH STAR
PURPOSE
SHOULD
CHALLENGE US
INDUSTRIALISING IMAGINATION
ACTIVE TOLERANCE
A FUTURE NOW DIAGNOSTIC
CHAPTER 12: THE EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET
THE LIMITS OF PLAN AND ACT
GOALS VS PROBLEMS
CURIOSITY IS LIFE. ASSUMPTION IS DEATH (MARK PARKER, CHAIRMAN, NIKE)
STAY WITH THE PROBLEM LONGER
HOW TO GET BETTER AT BEING WRONG
LINEAR VS NON-LINEAR
ARE WE SOLVING OR REIMAGING?
RATIONAL AND EMOTIONAL
SUSTAINABILITY
IDENTITY
THE PERILS OF SELF-EXPRESSION
YOU ARE NOT YOUR IDEAS
THE POWER OF THE CHECK-IN
CHAPTER 13: THE OPEN MINDSET
OPEN MINDSETS
OPEN TEAMS
BUILDING SHARED AWARENESS
HOW TO USE THE MINDSET QUADRANTS
BUILDING OPEN CULTURE
RECOGNISING THE DEFENSIVE MINDSET AT WORK
OPEN ORGANISATIONS
IS THERE A SWITCH MARKED ‘OPEN’ IN YOUR ORGANISATION?
OPEN MINDSETS CREATE ABUNDANCE
PART 3: MINDSETS IN MOTION
CHAPTER 14: BUILDING A FUTURE NOW ORGANISATION
THE GROWTH HUB
EXTERNALISING IMI
ASSUMPTION BUSTING
BALANCING RISK, AMBITION, AND REALITY
MANGING THE VALUE TRILEMMA
THE REAL MEANING OF GROWTH MINDSET
LEARNING TO LIVE AND THRIVE WITH FAILURE
BREAKING THE RULES
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
List of Illustrations
Part 1
FIGURE P1.1
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1.1 Layers of self-awareness that comprise mindset
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.1 A highly conceptualised view of how unpredicted sensory informati...
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 An example of an affective circumplex
FIGURE 3.2 Proportion of rulings in favour of the prisoners over a day. Circ...
FIGURE 3.3 Ultradian cycles throughout the 24 circadian cycle highlight our ...
FIGURE 3.4 Interoceptive signals generated within the body
FIGURE 3.5 Interoceptive awareness is the foundation of self-awareness
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4.1 A simplified picture of Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of construc...
FIGURE 4.2 Differences between classical and constructed views of emotion...
FIGURE 4.3 Feelings, emotions, and core human needs
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.1 Experimental assumption log
FIGURE 5.2 Examples of judger and learner questions
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8.1 How to build a mindset
FIGURE 8.2 Mindset-building starter questions
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9.1 The cube
FIGURE 9.2 What are your emotions telling you?
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10.1 Building the ‘more human’ mindset
FIGURE 10.2 The reactive cycles
FIGURE 10.3 An experiment in radical self-awareness
FIGURE 10.4 The affective circumplex
FIGURE 10.5 Weekly interoception accuracy readings
FIGURE 10.6 Daily mindset readings (affect, social, emotion, thinking, seein...
FIGURE 10.7 Daily input scores (diet, alcohol, recovery, exercise, sleep)...
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11.1 The ‘future now’ mindset
FIGURE 11.2 The corporate lifecycle, Adizes Institute 2022®
FIGURE 11.3 The value trilemma
FIGURE 11.4 The 95/5 focus of the past organisation
FIGURE 11.5 Future now organisations
FIGURE 11.6 The past present vs future now mindset
FIGURE 11.7 The symbiotic relationship between value today and tomorrow in t...
FIGURE 11.8 Defensive vs open mindsets
FIGURE 11.9 The 3 Horizons model – adapted from the
Alchemy of Growth
FIGURE 11.10 Four horizons of opportunity
FIGURE 11.11 Decoding our purpose
FIGURE 11.12 A future now diagnostic
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12.1 The experimental mindset
FIGURE 12.2 Plan and act vs test and learn
FIGURE 12.3 Test and learn methods
FIGURE 12.5 The product–market fit pyramid (used by permission)
FIGURE 12.6 Staying longer with the problem
Chapter 13
FIGURE 13.1 The open mindset
FIGURE 13.2 Meeting of open mindsets
FIGURE 13.3 Building the inclusive instinct
FIGURE 13.4 Mindset quadrants
FIGURE 13.5 How is mindset influencing performance?
FIGURE 13.6 Five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other tea...
FIGURE 13.7 Recognising defensive mechanisms
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14.1 Excerpt from IMI's 2021 annual report
FIGURE 14.2 Summary of IMI's market led innovation model
FIGURE 14.3 IMI's Adaptix soft jaw
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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LEADING IN A NON-LINEAR WORLD
BUILDING WELLBEING, STRATEGIC AND INNOVATION MINDSETS FOR THE FUTURE
JEAN GOMES
This edition first published 2023.Copyright © 2023 by Jean Gomes. All rights reserved.
Registered offices
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available
ISBN 9781119672722 (Hardback)ISBN 9781119672753 (ePDF)ISBN 9781119672708 (ePub)
Cover Design and Image and illustrations: Courtesy of Jean Gomes and Michelle Beagley
INTRODUCTION
We are living in a non-linear world, in which more of the problems we face do not have a clear sequence of cause to effect to solution. As the last decade of shocking and unsettling events has shown us, our environment is becoming less stable and predictable. As a result, more of the challenges we encounter in our wellbeing, work, and society cannot be solved using only the linear ‘plan and act’ approaches, based on assumptions of what's worked in the past.
New and emerging questions require a different way of thinking about our future:
Can we keep working longer and more continuously?
How will artificial intelligence (AI) or automation change career paths?
How will a workforce of four very different generations, skill sets, and values synergise, and what does that mean for the future?
What if decade-old assumptions about the sustainability of our global economic system no longer hold true?
And today's ‘wicked problems',1 including climate change and the availability and provision of food, energy, and clean water, will continue to play out in unexpected ways as technological innovation and geopolitics unfold.
Linear thinking and action work when problems are well understood, and solutions are conceivable or proven. However, as the complexity and uncertainty of these problems and the solutions we might build (think nanotechnologies or robotics) increase, we need to embrace an additional approach – a non-linear way of thinking and action. This requires us to embrace not knowing what the true nature of a problem is, or how we will solve it. If linear thinking and action is about exploiting past knowledge to achieve a goal, non-linear methods are about action learning: running parallel experiments to rapidly bust our assumptions and find new solutions, as we did in developing Covid vaccines in an astonishingly short time.
Whilst work is undoubtedly more rewarding economically and intellectually than for previous generations, it has also reached a tipping point of burning out more people from top to bottom. For decades, we've gradually adapted to overflowing inboxes, back-to-back meetings, and the relentless expectation of more for less. More people live a negative-normal existence, feeling depleted, defensive, and disconnected from the priorities, people, and passions in their lives that matter outside of work.
Acceptance of the non-linear nature of our world allows us to see better both the complexity of our circumstances and the patterns in our responses. By learning how we make sense of the overwhelming tide of information rolling over us, tuning into our mindset, and drawing on what only the combined forces of thinking, feeling, and seeing can offer, we can start to meet complexity with complexity. I believe hope lies in our inexorable ingenuity as a species to evolve out of a burnout spiral, whilst at the same time recognising that we are always our own worst enemies. In the coming decade, as new technologies automate more routine work, we have an opportunity to ask ourselves: What should work mean to us in the future, and what do we uniquely bring?
One part of the answer is to focus on and celebrate how we as humans uniquely create value. Creative problem-solving, nuanced judgement, and decision-making, combined with our ability for sensemaking (our ability to organise chaotic data into a form we can process and understand) in complex and uncertain situations, are vital to surviving a non-linear world. All humans are capable of this – but these qualities are more contingent on mindset than our track record, education, or status.
These qualities are unique to us. AI and other forms of technological automation lack the capacity to perform these ‘mystical’ acts of intuition, non-linear and counterfactual thinking, and there's no likelihood they will develop the ability to do so in the next 50 or more years.2
We are living in an era of radical uncertainty according to economists John Kay and Mervyn King,3 where more of the answers we should be giving as leaders are, ‘I don't know'. This provokes feelings and emotions, such as doubt, that have long been seen as signs of weakness and a barrier to rational thinking and problem-solving. As we'll see, nothing could be further from the truth.
Leading in a Non-Linear World aims to give you a deeper understanding of your mindset and the means to grow and strengthen it. It draws on exciting developments in neuroscience, experimental psychology, and physiology, and our team's research and work with over 70,000 people worldwide.
Part 1 begins with a redefinition of the term ‘mindset’, from being a set of beliefs and attitudes, to widening it to encompass how we make sense of the world through feelings, emotions, thoughts, and perception. This includes recent breakthroughs in the understanding of consciousness, metacognition (our ability to think about thinking), and the influence of our bodies on our sensemaking – including new theories overturning conventional wisdom on how our emotions and perception work. These combine into a model for mindset that enables us to explore ways of building and strengthening it.
In Part 2, we'll explore four mindsets for the future of our life and work, applying the tools and theories discussed in Part 1.
The
more human
mindset looks at how radical self-awareness increases the flow of information from our mind and bodies, making healthier behaviours and wellbeing a more natural default setting.
The
future now
mindset tackles the perennial challenge of short termism. How can individuals and organisations simultaneously achieve their short- and long-term goals?
The
experimental
mindset helps those adopting the ‘test and learn’ playbook developed by the start-up community to succeed in the many countercultural and counterintuitive ways it asks of us.
The
open
mindset is about unlocking new ways of seeing the world; how we can pioneer new ways of working and build future organisations.
In Part 3, we'll examine a case study of an enterprise driving change through mindset adoption to improve wellbeing, performance, and growth.
We build our mindsets by intentionally thinking about them. By reading this book, you're taking an important step in building mindsets for your future.
PART 1THE NEW SCIENCE OF MINDSET AND SELF-AWARENESS
FIGURE P1.1
Source: Jean Gomes
Our mindsets result from the interplay of feeling, thinking, and seeing – creating instances of knowing, doubt, or certainty.
CHAPTER 1WHAT IS MINDSET?
The term ‘mindset’ has become laden with significance in recent times. The dictionary definition suggests a fixed set of beliefs and attitudes that shape our actions. But think about this for a moment. Are your actions driven solely by your assumptions and beliefs? I'm sure it won't take you long to recall numerous situations where you acted against your ‘beliefs’. Not because of cognitive bias, or social pressure, but for a whole host of urges and feelings that combined to create a sense of certainty in the moment which defied being logical.
And we don't have just one mindset. We have collections of beliefs, many of which occupy contradictory positions, shaped by different contexts, interpretations of risk, uncertainty, and social influences. We may have a playful mindset when working with one group of people and unconsciously adopt a pragmatic one with another. Our mindset can be profoundly different when we're with strangers, travelling, fatigued, overwhelmed, or feeling unfairly treated.
Mindset is now code for everything from the zeitgeist, worldviews, personality, attitudes, beliefs, motivation, political and social affiliation, and identity. Why has the term, relatively little used until a decade ago, become so sticky? Perhaps it helps us to join the dots between the enormous societal change we're experiencing and what's going on inside us.
Most influential in the recent popularity of the term has been Carol Dweck's theory of fixed and growth mindsets in children. According to Dweck, a child with a fixed mindset believes their abilities are permanent traits and can't be changed. The belief, for example, that ‘I'm not good at maths’, leads to another thought that ‘working harder won't pay off’. These beliefs shape behaviours, such as de-prioritising maths revision, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy when they fail or get poor grades – ‘see I was right, I'm no good at maths!’. A fixed mindset works the other way too. A child naturally good at maths thinking that their talent and inherent ability is a given may believe they don't need to work any harder. Either way, a fixed mindset becomes a narrowing self-definition of an individual's potential.
A growth mindset is based on the belief that one's talents and abilities can be developed over time through effort and persistence. Dweck observed children with this belief seeing maths problems that they couldn't yet solve as a positive challenge; their belief was ‘bring it on!’. In her laboratory, Dweck was able to demonstrate that simple interventions could help children build a growth mindset and positively impact on their performance. Children were taught about the brain's capacity to change and how memory worked. Teachers were encouraged to use specific forms of appreciation to encourage and reinforce when children adopted growth mindset approaches. Evidence showed academic improvements and reduction in aggression and bullying.
The appeal of the growth mindset was such that it was readily adopted as a model in classrooms around the world. However, it soon became clear that it was not as simple as showing children a picture of the fixed and growth mindsets and encouraging them to adopt a new set of beliefs. In a much-cited meta-analysis study1 of mindset and academic achievement across 400,000 students, classroom training efforts showed a weak effect on improved performance. Another detailed study2 conducted amongst 600 school children, closely replicating Dweck's studies, failed to show interventions leading to any improvement in students overcoming difficult challenges more effectively. There is evidence of the positive impact of the training, but generally in settings where the school's culture already encourages children to strive beyond their expectations. Where peer norms amongst students discourage challenge-seeking, the impact was unclear. The failure lies not in the theory but in the execution according to Dweck, but she acknowledges3 that the ‘growth mindset is even more complex than we imagined’.
Part of the success of the idea of fixed vs growth mindsets is that it makes intuitive sense. I'm sure we have all seen children, or young adults, perhaps our own, who tell themselves they are incapable of things that we ‘know’ they could achieve if they just believed in themselves. The immediacy of the idea – its ‘rightness’ – is a clue as to why teachers may have failed to understand how to create the conditions for building a growth mindset. Dave Paunesku, co-founder of the Project for Education Research in the USA, points to the root of failures being that many ‘teachers approach it like quadratic equation. You can't just think of it as a regular thing to teach, because the internalization of it is so important’.4 The trap lies in thinking that a mindset is simply a cognitive framework or model that you can show people and suddenly they think, ‘of course, I could be great at maths if only I believed in myself’.
This is where we depart from Dweck and many other descriptions of mindset. Most of which are, in fact, simply mental models. In other words, they are ways of looking at, or thinking about, situations. As we'll consider later, most smart people have a misplaced belief that once they intellectually understand something, they can master it behaviourally. So, mindset as an idea seems eminently teachable. Of course, the idea part is important, but it doesn't reflect fully what's going on inside us to describe how we respond to these models.
CREATING A BIGGER INNER WORLD
What researchers are showing us is that our mindsets result from the interplay of feeling, thinking, and seeing – creating instances of knowing, doubt, or certainty. This opens new possibilities for us taking more control over our lives and gaining greater psychological freedom in the face of uncertainty. This is not just about understanding an idea and adopting positive thinking. Building a mindset modifies and grows the networks and structures in your brain, and the hormones and neurotransmitters you produce. In turn, these impact on your immediate and long-term health, how open you are to new information, the decisions you make, how others see you, and the nature of the relationships you form. Your mindset, for better or worse, defines your life.
The disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, and physiology are showing us a new way of thinking about how our bodies and brain work together to navigate the world. This understanding highlights the central importance of self-awareness, for example how significant it is to be connected to your physical feelings and understand how they are different from emotions and thoughts, which we often confuse.
FIGURE 1.1 Layers of self-awareness that comprise mindset
Source: Jean Gomes
At the core of mindset building is a new, deeper form of self-awareness: being able to pay attention to multiple dimensions of your interior world and observe how they influence one another. These ‘layers’ of self-awareness (Figure 1.1) start with raw consciousness – the sense of self. Depending on the metabolic state of your body, you experience positive or negative affect, the term psychologists use to describe the sum of your physical feelings. Next in our mindset system come emotions, which require a necessary re-evaluation in both their function and potential. As we'll see, your brain runs profoundly on predictions, so the assumptions you make and how they inform your beliefs are generally inseparable from what you see as reality. Perception is part of your prediction system, so we often confuse what we see with what we think. Across each dimension of this system, you have the incredible capacity of metacognition, the ability to pull apart and think about how you feel, think, and see. This strategic form of awareness enables you to connect deeply with the signals in your body, to read the invaluable information your emotions are telling you, to challenge and bust unhelpful or limiting assumptions and to see more clearly.
What's truly exciting is that the chief mechanism of mindset building is within the immediate reach of everyone. It's not dependent on intelligence or means. As the metacognition neuroscientist, Stephen Fleming, told me, the most powerful way of building our interior world is to think about it. When we do it intentionally, the processes of neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to adapt to experience, enables us to build our mindset. Self-awareness, in its many forms, is key to building mindsets, not conceptually, but architecturally. Our mindset is, at its most fundamental level, the product of the neurochemistry, brain structures, and neural networks we've evolved over the course of our life. As we do so, we gain the power to see and close the knowing–doing gaps in our lives, where we confuse an intellectual understanding of something we should do with actually doing it.
CHAPTER 2CONSCIOUSNESSES – OUR SENSE OF SELF
Let's start by understanding the importance of connecting deeply with our sense of self and our physical feelings, because when this connection is lost or weakened, it undermines the foundation of our mindset.
Consciousness can be described as the mind's subjective experience, our most profound sense of self. When you wake up in the morning, there are a few moments before you start thinking when you experience it most fully. Our interior world of feelings and thoughts is suffused with this sense of self. Neuroscientist, Anil Seth, borrowing from the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, describes consciousness as what ‘it feels like something to be me’.1 This sensation is distinct from the awareness of your thoughts, knowledge, identity, or behaviour.
Consciousness has long been held to have mystic properties and assumed to be beyond our comprehension. In the 17th century René Descartes described the mind–body problem which has continued to challenge us for over four centuries. Whilst consciousness was an undeniable quality of mind, Descartes argued that the structure of the brain and body could not explain its existence. The brain and body exist in space, the mind does not. Therefore, consciousness must be a God-given phenomenon. The belief that it must exist outside the discernible physical universe has exerted a powerful, if sometimes unspoken, influence over science ever since, warning researchers off the territory. Stuart Sutherland's 1989 entry on consciousnesses in no less than the International Dictionary of Psychology asserted that ‘it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it’.
Until the 1990s, efforts to explain consciousness were still largely the preserve of philosophers. They too regarded it as unfathomable by science. However, in 1994, an unknown 27-year-old philosopher, David Chalmers, threw an intellectual mind bomb that has continued to reverberate ever since. He described the hard part of consciousness as ‘why and how do neurophysiological activities produce the experience of consciousness?’.2 The easy (not easy, but conceivable) part of consciousness being ‘how individual sensory mechanisms such as sight, focus and process information?’. For Chalmers, the hard part of the problem was finding a reason why our mental functions needed to feel like anything in the first place. Memory, or learning, could theoretically function, as computers and phones do, without consciousness, without any sense of self.
Chalmers' new framing of consciousness energised the debate with Nobel laureate Francis Crick and Christof Koch kick-starting the current neuroscience-led revolution in understanding. Using emerging scanning technologies, their work on the neural correlates of consciousness gave researchers a practical method of, for example, observing the experience of sensing a specific colour and how that resulted in a consistent and specific pattern of brain activity. Experiments were able to seemingly tease apart sensory responses such as vision and taste from those of consciousness, but they couldn't tell us why. Thirty years on, answers are now starting to emerge as researchers look beyond the brain's cortex, where it was long held to reside.
Mark Solms is part of a new wave of researchers who are taking a different approach which opens up a new way of thinking about mindset. Solms believes that the hard problem arose because we were looking in the wrong place and at the wrong mental functions. Instead of seeking consciousness as a property of higher cortical functions, such as reading or facial recognition, that can run independently of consciousness, he argues we should be looking at functions that are intrinsically conscious. This led him to focus on physical feelings that arise from internal sensors in the body. Feelings, he points out, unlike perception and memory, are inherently conscious mental states.
Feelings such as hunger, sleepiness, thirst, rage, and fear that, whilst registered in the cortex, are generated in the brain stem. Solms believes the cortex is not intrinsically conscious but borrows its consciousness from the brain stem. To illustrate this, he points out that even minor damage to certain parts of the brain stem – say the removal of a match head-sized piece – will consistently result in a coma. ‘That's how concentrated the consciousness producing power of the brain stem is. Conversely, you can remove large parts of cortex, without obliterating any consciousness’. This is evidenced in children born without a cortex, a devastating condition known as hydranencephaly. Remarkably, these children show a clear sense of self, responding with appropriate emotions to stimuli. They will giggle when tickled, startle when frightened, cry when frustrated. Without any cortex, affective consciousness is clearly present.
The earliest forms of consciousness evolved in simple creatures and were no more sophisticated than feeling hot or thirsty. These feelings were rooted in the most basic biological need to survive. Feelings enabled them to discern what was good and bad for them and raised an organism's action beyond automaticity, reflex, and instinct; responses which only work in predictable situations.
The evolutionary advantage of feeling was that it created feedback loops that facilitated voluntary behaviour, allowing organisms to navigate new and uncertain situations by feeling their way through them. As Solms puts it, this profound form of decision-making is based on the notion that ‘I feel like this about that. Thinking about consciousness from the bottom-up makes the hard problem less hard’.
Just how deeply feeling and the maintenance of our metabolic equilibrium influences our mindset can be seen in the work of researchers looking at the impact of temperature on decision-making.3 Decision-making under pressure has long been studied as it involves a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Putting people in hot tubs and testing their decision-making confirmed the phenomenon that time appears to speed up when core body temperature increases, reducing the perceived time available and lessening the quality and accuracy of our decisions.
THE PREDICTING BRAIN
Imagine you're picking up your 9.30am cup of coffee from the desk in front of you. Largely unconsciously, your brain is calculating the effects that it will have on your body. But as you start to drink, you realise it's tea not coffee and, despite it being made to your liking, it has created a prediction error which you register as a feeling of surprise, or even mild disgust. You expected coffee, based on prior experiences, and your senses created an error signal registered in your brain stem as a feeling.
FIGURE 2.1 A highly conceptualised view of how unpredicted sensory information (prediction errors) flow up to ‘course correct’ the top-down predictions based on prior experience
Source: Compiled from various sources included: Seth, A., 2021. Being You : A New Science of Consciousness. 1st ed. Penguin Publishing Group; Peter Sterling, Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation, Physiology & Behavior,,Volume 106, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 5-15; Clark, A., 2019. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. 1st ed. Oxford University Press; Fleming Stephen M., 2021. Know Thyself, The New Science of Self-Awareness John Murray; Barrett, L., 2017. HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE. 1st ed. London: Macmillan.
This is a key building block in understanding how our mindset operates. Our brain is a prediction-making machine, unremittingly making a series of ‘top-down’ guesses, based on past experience, which are met with ‘bottom-up’ sensory information that either confirms or counters those predictions. Karl Friston describes the underlying mechanism of this experience mathematically in his free energy theory.4 Free energy describes the state resulting from the brain's failure to make a correct prediction. The brain does all it can to avoid free energy. Predictive errors equate to surprise, in other words consciousness. When things do not work as expected, we get consciousness – a state, he believes, the brain tries to limit.
In 1995, a major step towards our current understanding of the predicting brain theory was made by Bharat Biswal.5 For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists assumed that the brain was mainly a passive system reacting to the environment, reinforcing the computer analogy. In this model, information was processed in one direction, resulting in instructions to make us react. Initially rejected, Biswal's work led to a paradigm shift in how neuroscientists think. Instead of neurons being mostly inactive until aroused, it became clear that they're constantly firing – the phenomenon called intrinsic brain activity. This activity forms part of a system of sensory feedback loops and predictions that are unceasingly, unconsciously, and effortlessly happening, enabling us to construct reality and manage precious resources – prediction being more energy efficient than reactivity.
Imagine the doorbell rings late at night. You're not expecting a guest, so your mind starts to formulate inferences of what might be happening. A forgotten Amazon parcel being dropped off by a stressed delivery driver who has fallen behind schedule. A neighbour whose power has failed and is asking for help. Or a more worrying thought; it's the police with bad news. Considering the last possibility causes your body to start mobilising resources for fight or flight. All of this from a late-night press of your doorbell. Turns out it's the Amazon driver after all. This illustrates another key idea in the prediction model; that our brain is continuously running predictions based on a form of Bayesian statistics.
In the 1770s, Revd Thomas Bayes developed a theorem that has become integral to thinking about the brain's modelling of reality. Unlike frequentist statistics, which calculate the probability of an event happening, Bayesian statistics describes the degree of belief in an event happening, based on prior knowledge, and then updates those probabilities as new information is obtained. Scientists are starting to believe that the brain operates its perception in an approximation to Bayesian statistics. Bayesian thinking is helpful as it points to the brain's goal of reducing uncertainty. A brain running on probability or risk algorithms is going to struggle given the vast number of inverse problems it needs to solve (an inverse problem being where we can see the symptoms but not the causes).
These predictions underpin our social mechanisms. For instance, as you're watching your partner talking, their body language, facial expressions, tone, and your environment fuel hundreds of tiny predictions, guiding you when you should smile, look concerned, or reach out to touch their shoulder to empathise.
CHAPTER 3WHAT YOUR BODY IS TELLING YOU
The prediction–sensory loops of body and mind explain the fascinating evidence that our body often knows before our mind when good or bad things are about to happen to us. By tuning more intentionally into our physical signals, we strengthen the connection between the body and brain. To achieve this, we need to start by distinguishing between physical feeling and emotion, which we generally lump together in our thoughts. ‘I'm feeling tired’, or ‘I feel blurrghh’ are not emotions, but physical feelings. However, many of us are losing connection with these potent signals through overwork and a cocktail of poor diet, insufficient sleep, and exercise, with too much screen time, leaving us numb. At the same time, we feel in some unfathomable way detached from the world and the people and passions that matter most to us.
Affect is the continuous feeling sensation that encapsulates our brain's management of the body's systems – including tracking our heart rate, hormones, immune system, hydration, glucose, oxygen, and salt levels. This tracking coalesces as a general mood, or we might think of it as our body's climate. It can be characterised in two dimensions – pleasant/unpleasant and high/low energy. In our layer model, affect sits between consciousness and emotions. In 1980, James A. Russell created the affective circumplex1 to help researchers track affect (see Figure 3.1).
The state of our affect profoundly influences the brain's predictions and therefore judgement. If we slept poorly after a difficult day and went to bed with high levels of stress hormones, it's likely that we won't get much of the deeper levels of sleep where our metabolism does its heaviest lifting, eliminating toxins and producing helpful hormones and neurotransmitters. After a day and night like this, our affect is likely to be negative; we feel tired, toxic, and uncomfortable. But these feelings are not emotions, though they acutely influence them and our thoughts. Having insufficient fuel in our tank will impact the predictions our mind makes – ‘the day ahead will be hard’, ‘the traffic will be hell’, ‘Liam won't like my proposal’, ‘I won't have enough time to work on the new project’ and so on.
FIGURE 3.1 An example of an affective circumplex
Source: Adapted from James Russel’s circumflex model of affect (1980).
The critical influence of how resourced we are, whilst perhaps seemingly obvious, has long been under-acknowledged in mainstream thinking about judgement. In part, it's because our physical functioning has been seen as private, personal, and not business relevant. It's your tangible experience, skills, and expertise that count. But these attributes may count for little if the bedrock of your mindset is compromised and you haven't developed the capacity to notice. The psychologist and Nobel laurate, Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow cites a study2 that brings to life the serious consequences of inattention to affect and decision-making.
The researchers looked at over a thousand judicial rulings given by eight Jewish-Israeli judges, presiding over two parole boards serving four major prisons in Israel. Most of the decisions (78.2%) were parole requests. The analysis is shocking given the life-altering implications of the decisions. At the start of the sessions, and after breaks, there's a 65% probability of being given parole. This reduces to zero just before the breaks. It's safe to say, the same influence of affect is taking place in every business, school, and institution around the world.
If unacknowledged feelings of hunger or fatigue are the problem, what's the solution? For over 15 years, I worked alongside Tony Schwartz and his pioneering work at The Energy Project. One of our biggest contributions has been to normalise the idea of recovery as an intrinsic part of performance in the organisations we worked with. There is no sustainable peak performance without effective renewal. One of the ways in which we evidenced this, and described in our book, The Way We're Working Isn't Working,3 is the phenomenon of ultradian cycles.
FIGURE 3.2 Proportion of rulings in favour of the prisoners over a day. Circled points indicate the first decision in each of the three decision sessions following food breaks indicated by the dotted line
Source: Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(17), 6889–6892. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
Whilst food plays a role in the judge's decision-making, perhaps even more important is the influence of their deep physiological need for rest throughout the day. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman uncovered the 90-minute basic sleep rhythm (BRAC rhythm). Many of us are probably familiar with the left-hand side of Figure 3.3, which shows how brain activity changes as we move through deeper and shallower stages of sleep. Less well known is what's happening on the right-hand side of the picture; that these cycles continue throughout the day as well. Our wakeful brain alternates between higher-frequency, energy-intensive states for around 90 minutes, where we can operate at our peak, followed by lower-frequency activity for about 20 minutes where we might experience brain fog and fatigue. Crucially, flat lining without brief periods of effective renewal encourages the sympathetic nervous system to get aroused, stimulating our fight or flight responses. Not only does pushing through the 90-minute cycle create a progressive energy debt, ensuring that we're exhausted at the end of the day, it also produces a defensive mindset, because fundamentally, we're not getting what we need.
FIGURE 3.3 Ultradian cycles throughout the 24 circadian cycle highlight our need for periodic daytime recovery
Sources: Kleitman, N., Sleep and Wakefulness, 1963; Ultradian Rhythms from Molecules to Mind A New Vision of Life David Lloyd, Ernest Rossi · 2008; Intrinsic Clocks By Timo Partonen, Daniela D. Pollak · 2018.
