CHAPTER 
How Human Beings Experience the World
We decide whether an experience is “good” or “bad,” and the meaning we assign to our experience creates and reinforces our identity, beliefs, capabilities, and behavior.
Ineed your help, Christine,” said the chief revenue officer. “Our sales and marketing people are overwhelmed by constantly changing legislation, the new markets we’re trying to penetrate are not opening up, we’re missing revenue projections, and the board is increasing the pressure. Everyone is discouraged, and they know they need to shift their attitude, but they can’t seem to do it. Healthcare is a tough enough business without all this internal turmoil!”
Have you ever been in this situation? External and internal factors are pressuring you, and there’s no sign of relief. You’ve got to get everyone on board pronto, but all your efforts haven’t worked. In the midst of it all, you’re doing your best to have a “better attitude” about the whole scenario. In this organization’s case, although the initial instinct was to throw more bodies, tools, or money at the problem, it was not what they needed. And it wasn’t as simple as just telling themselves to feel better.
For organizations in similar circumstances, the real issue has nothing to do with what happened or what needs to be done. It’s what it means that matters. The meaning determines how it feels. And if shifting their attitude doesn’t feel good, they won’t do it. They will stay stuck.
In a “perfect storm” scenario like this, we need to have tools to shift our state, which we’ll cover in Part II. But before we can use the tools, we must understand how we experience and create our experiences in the world. We must start with our emotions.
Consider this for a moment: if I delivered a big chunk of marble to your doorstep, how would you feel? If you viewed it as an obstruction, you’d probably feel annoyed. But if you were a sculptor, you might celebrate—you’d have some new material to work with!
In this chapter, you’ll learn about what I call the Critter State and the Smart State, and you’ll see how shifting to the Smart State can help you and your teams view any situation the way a sculptor would. From the Smart State, teams can see new openings, new solutions, and new approaches. They can also reframe existing perceived problems and challenges as opportunities to work with rather than seeing them as obstructions working against them. Everything has its uses, even challenges and perceived limitations.
As you deepen your understanding of what it means to be human and explore how you experience and generate experience in the world, you’ll become more able to honor and respect both your experiences and the experiences of others and to do so with less judgment. Because you’ll come to fully understand that everyone is truly doing the best they can with the tools they currently have. And that experience can be adjusted to be made better.
As my mentor Carl Buchheit says, human beings will always reach for the best feeling available on their menu. The sales and marketing teams didn’t lack power. They lacked choices on their menu. In other words, to feel more powerful, we don’t need to turn off our emotions or ignore them. We just need to add better feelings to our menu. It’s all about choices.
You’ll also come to see that you’re not alone—we’re all in this together. And it’s time for us all to have more tools. It’s time for us to have more choices. It’s time for us to feel more powerful—not in having power over others but in having power over our own experience and emotional state.
Here are some signs that there are opportunities for you to deepen the connection, choice, and appreciation of your experience. This chapter will help if you are experiencing the following:
• Internal conflict, in which part of you wants to do or be something yet doesn’t, or part of you doesn’t want to do or be something yet does
• Resistance to an internal or external experience, behavior, belief, person, idea, or situation
• Being stuck in a repetitive pattern that you no longer want
• Reacting from fear and negative meaning making rather than responding from choice and positive meaning making
• Desiring something better, but you are somehow not able to get it
To quote the late great Wayne Dyer, “Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”1 This is the good news. Not only can you learn emotional regulation and optimize the performance of your prefrontal cortex, you can also define the experience you want and create it. That’s how powerful you are.
Our journey together in this chapter will help you understand the following:
1. How we decide whether what is happening to us is good or bad
2. How stimulus from outside events causes us to assign meaning to our experience
3. How this meaning reinforces our beliefs and identity
4. How our behaviors then match and further reinforce them
THE LOGICAL LEVELS OF CHANGE
According to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, humans experience change at certain levels.2 At STI, we see these levels as concentric circles where change can occur outside in, inside out, or both simultaneously. Figure 1.1 shows how the circles work.
Figure 1.1 Logical Levels of Change
Source: Figure adapted and modified from initial work by Gregory Bateson and Robert Dilts.
When we are challenged by external change, many Logical Levels of Change are affected. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say leadership has decided to relocate a team, overnight, to a new business market that speaks a foreign language. If that team were told they had to continue to grow the business and sustain its core mission, everyone would initially panic. It would be a big shock to the system.
This external change of moving to a new business market demands that the team do the following:
• Adapt to a new environment or adjust it to suit their needs. For ex-ample, they would be breathing in new air, eating new food perhaps, and living in new quarters. They might have to adjust to working in a new office environment (such as high-rise accommodations) or adjust to living farther away from the office than they used to.
• Behave differently. They might have to wake up at a different time and use different modes of transportation to get to work.
• Develop new capabilities. They may need to learn a new language or learn how to work with a translator in order to effectively communicate with the new customers and the new community.
• Expand their beliefs to include their colleagues and customers in this new world as collaborative, receptive, and welcoming.
• Expand their identity to include that they could work in this environment successfully.
All of these would support their core because they wouldn’t be making the change if it didn’t honor their mission or purpose (or the change would be short-lived!).
As we navigate these levels of change, it’s essential that we also manage our mind. So let’s consider what’s happening in our brain as these changes are occurring.
MANAGING YOUR MIND: THE CRITTER STATE AND THE SMART STATE
Your brain has three essential parts: the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and the prefrontal cortex. We find the “triune brain” system proposed by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean (1913 to 2007) to be a simple and effective model for the very complex human brain.3 MacLean found from his work that the human brain is really three brains in one (hence “triune brain”). He also coined the term limbic system:
1. The reptilian brain, or protoreptilian brain (includes the brain stem, midbrain, and basal ganglia): The first part is located in the brain stem, and it sits at the base of the skull. It’s the oldest and most primitive part of the brain, and it governs basic life-support systems such as breathing, feeding, sexuality, dominance, aggression, temperature regulation, and balance. It acts out of instinct, and it is primarily a stimulus-response machine with survival as its goal. It does not understand quality of life. It understands only dead and not dead. The reptilian brain is also where sensory information (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) enters our brain.
2. The mammalian brain, or paleo-mammalian brain (includes the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and other structures in the limbic system): The second part governs emotion, motivational systems, learning, short-term memory, and the body’s response to danger (that is, how we respond to external stimuli, instincts, and past experiences). The key player here is the limbic system—that is, the emotional center of the brain that determines our fight/flight/freeze/faint response. The mammalian brain’s primary focus is also survival, though it is additionally the seat of the more sophisticated emotions of separation distress, social emotions, maternal nurturance, anger, frustration, happiness, and love.
3. The neocortex, or neo-mammalian brain: This part of the brain is the newest and most evolved part of the brain. The prefrontal cortex within the neocortex enables us to plan, innovate, solve complex problems, think abstract thoughts, and have visionary ideas. It allows us to measure the quality of our experience, compare it to an abstract ideal, and yearn for change. It also allows us to have a number of advanced behaviors, including social connection, toolmaking, language, envisioning possible futures, and higher-level consciousness. It helps us to determine the meaning of the sensory information we’ve taken in via the reptilian brain.
If we combine the limbic system in the mammalian brain with the survival mechanism in the reptilian brain, we have the powerful combo pack we’ll call the critter brain, as my mentor Carl Buchheit of NLP Marin terms it.4 Once our critter brain has equated a particular phenomenon with safety or survival, it will do so as long as we are not dead because, again, it doesn’t care about quality of life—it cares only about survival.
For example, if you watch a herd of antelope being chased by a cheetah, you’ll see that their strategies for escape aren’t incredibly elaborate. They all react the same: it’s everyone for themselves; run, run, run! And no matter how much they know they are at the top of a cheetah’s “to eat” list, they don’t update their approach to avoiding death the next time a cheetah is on the hunt.
For the purpose of simplicity, we’ll distill this to two states. The first is the Critter State, in which we don’t have access to all parts of our brain and thus are reactive, in fight/flight/freeze/faint mode—that is, we are running safety programs (Figure 1.2). The second is the Smart State, in which we have easy access to all of our resources and can respond from choice (Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.2 The Critter State
Figure 1.3 The Smart State
Just like the antelope, when a business is facing a threat, its people often go into Critter State. Communication stops, and teamwork goes down the drain. People may get aggressive or territorial, or they may behave in an “Everyone has to fend for themselves” manner. They retreat to what is familiar rather than pause to assess the situation and make decisions from a more resourceful state.
What kinds of threats put us in Critter State? Well, change itself, for one. Our brains just don’t like change very much. It’s scary to the most primal parts that are hardwired to ensure that we are safe and we survive, which means the critter brain will want to keep things basically the same whenever possible because “same” equals “safe.”
Unfortunately, our behaviors in Critter State tend to create an environment where there is no or very low trust (often due to poor communication, constantly changing directives, high uncertainty, and/or excessive workloads), which exacerbates our Critter State. So we aren’t creative, we aren’t looking to innovate, and we aren’t seeking opportunity. We’re all about survival.
In contrast, when we’re in the Smart State, all three parts of our brain are firing on all cylinders. We have flexibility, power, choice, balance. If we receive an angry e-mail from someone, we say, “Sounds like he’s having a hard day,” instead of reacting with fight/flight/freeze/faint.
Change and growth depend on making sure the Smart State—not the Critter State—is driving management decisions and behavior. There’s already enough fear when things are changing, so it’s essential to continuously help people see that they are safe, they belong, and they matter, so they can shift into the Smart State.
More on this soon, but first let’s look at how we create the experiences that lead to either the Critter State or the Smart State—and how it affects the workplace.
HOW YOU CREATE EXPERIENCES
Every moment we are bombarded with sensory information. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory information is constantly coming our way via our five senses. The way we interpret this sensory input contributes to the way we structure our experience of the world. The senses that most dominate our behavior are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, so we’ll focus on those three.
What we call “thinking” is actually a series of pictures, sounds, and feelings that go by at light speed in our brains. The process by which this happens is illustrated and summarized in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4 How Sensory Information Is Processed in the Brain
As we interact with the world around us, we internally store images, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes that craft our experience.
Think of your favorite place in your home. Chances are good that you just called up a picture. We’ll call these visuals, or Vs in neuro-shorthand. Sometimes our brain distorts stored pictures (Vs) to give them different meanings. Maybe we don’t want the intensity of a full-color picture so we store it in black and white, or maybe our brain wants to prevent us from repeating a dangerous experience so we store it in overpowering color.
Additionally, when we have or recall an experience, our brain hears sounds, which can be tones or words either outside ourself (existing in the environment) or inside ourself (talking to ourself, hearing an old sound track). Think of the last time you made a mistake and internally said, “I can’t believe I did that! Sheesh!” That’s an internal sound track. Think of the sound of a phone ringing. That’s an external sound track. We’ll call these sounds auditory input, or As in neuro-shorthand.
Our visual and auditory experiences lead to feelings, or kinesthetic responses, or Ks in neuro-shorthand. Maybe your shoulders are tight or you feel a knot in your stomach. These physiological feelings are now translated into emotions you can name, such as fear, excitement, joy, or anger.
From these Vs, As, and their generated Ks, our prefrontal cortex makes meaning about the world, other people, situations, and ourselves. The meaning we make about these experiences formulates our beliefs.
Before we discuss beliefs, we must understand that the brain is a “meaning-making machine” that deletes, distorts, and generalizes information. Every second, overwhelming amounts of information come our way, and we filter that information to make sense of it by deleting a lot of what we deem not relevant or useful so that only some of it gets through. Otherwise we would experience information overload!
The brain also distorts information. For example, how often do you hear someone respond to the question “How are you?” with “Nothing is wrong with me!” The question was distorted to be the assertion “Something is wrong with you.” However, distortion also has its uses. It is what allows us to be creative. For example, a musician can listen to a song and create a new version of it as his or her unique expression.
Beliefs are generalizations about experiences, based on the meaning our prefrontal cortex has generated. For example, the brain generalizes that a chair is a chair, and objects that resemble a chair-like structure are appropriate for sitting. This is useful. That way, we don’t have to figure out whether we can sit on a particular object every time we walk into an office.
Another example is when we see someone point a finger at another and assume that the person doing the pointing is rude. “Everyone who points his or her finger like that is a rude person!” is a generalization and a belief.
Our beliefs about the world, others, situations, and ourselves drive our behavior. Beliefs about ourselves lie at a deeper level and are called identity. So in a stressful situation, when a person believes, “I can do this, and our team will get through this,” these beliefs reinforce his or her identity and his or her team’s identity as being solid and capable. As a result, the person with the “solid and capable” identity has the behavior of handling things and moving forward, while others may be panicking. Their behavior matches their identity.
So here’s how Vs, As, and Ks work together to create a new experience based on what you’ve already stored. Let’s say you walk into a conference room you’ve never been in before to deliver a high-stakes presentation, and the phone on the table rings. Your brain probably already has “conference room pictures” stored, so you instantly associate that ring tone with a stored picture of another conference room from a different time and place, one in which you totally rocked a presentation and your boss called you afterward to congratulate you on a job well done. That external trigger (hearing the telephone in the conference room) ignited a whole series of stored internal Vs and As that now lead to a whopping great positive K and the belief “My boss appreciates me!” You’ve never been in this room before, and you were a little nervous, but all you know now is that you feel great and you really like that phone.
The sound of the telephone in that setting is an anchor that invokes the experience of confidence and creates positive meaning for you. Here’s how it worked in your brain:
V (image of phone in conference room) + A (ring tone) = K (confidence)
This sequence then leads to this:
Belief (“My boss appreciates me!”)→ identity (“I am valued”)→ capability (confident and competent in business scenarios)
And you know what happens next: your behavior will match your beliefs, identity, and capability—in other words, the meaning you associate with these sensory experiences.
By the way, what makes this really interesting is that we can anchor those reference experiences to something new (a space, a sound, or a touch) to create the meaning we would like to create. That is to say, we can adjust the equation variables of V, A, and K to create a new set of beliefs. The tool that helps us achieve this is called Anchoring, and we’ll cover it in detail in Chapter 6.
WHY YOU DO WHAT YOU DO
Every day, all day, we are having experiences, creating meaning and forming new or reinforcing old beliefs, and forging a new identity or reinforcing our current one.
Let’s create an experience right now. Close your eyes and recall a positive memory, a time when you had a positive experience. Do this now, and then answer the following questions about your positive memory when the experience is super clear:
• What did you see?
• What did you hear outside or inside yourself (maybe you heard yourself saying, “This is awesome!”)?
• What did you feel?
• What did you decide (believe) about the situation and others and the world?
• What did you decide about yourself (your identity)?
For example, perhaps you recalled a recent team meeting:
• In it, you saw (Vs) everyone gathered around the table, excited, alert, ready to roll.
• You heard (As) people offering suggestions, brainstorming, making commitments. Inside you heard yourself say, “This is great—I love meetings like this. We’re accomplishing things. We’re all in sync.”
• You felt (Ks) powerful, optimistic, positive.
• You believed these were the right people in the right roles.
• Your identity that you are successful, you are a good leader, and you are adding value was reinforced.
The problem arises when we believe in a way that doesn’t create the best possible outcome. For the next week, please start to notice what associations you have with places and people. What feelings (Ks) do you get from certain sounds (As) and certain visuals (Vs)? What meaning do you make from the experience of the resulting positive or negative feeling (K+ or K−), and what does that cause you to do?
Let’s reflect on the situation I shared at the start of the chapter, in which the sales and marketing teams felt powerless due to constantly changing legislation, competitive markets, decreasing revenue, and the board’s increasing the pressure. It makes you wonder: What beliefs were governing their experience? What meaning did they make from the Vs, As, and Ks that caused them to feel powerless to make a change?
In Part II, you’re going to learn how to deactivate your own and your team members’ fear triggers and instead assign appropriate meaning so that you can help shift people from the Critter State to the Smart State. You’re going to learn exactly what to do to create a team that acts as a team, helping each other outperform the competition—an emotionally agile team that is resilient in the face of constant change.
Now that you understand how you create experiences, there’s just one more foundational concept to cover before we can leap into action: the three things all humans crave. We’ll cover those in the next chapter.
1. Human beings have three parts to their brain: the reptilian, the mammalian, and the neo cortex. We generally occupy one of two states, depending on which parts of our brain are “lit up”: the Critter State (fight/flight/freeze/faint) or the Smart State (connection, ease, choice).
2. We can learn to move from the Critter State to the Smart State so that we can be more resourceful in response to a turbulent internal or external environment. To do so, we must adjust the way the different parts of our brain process information.
3. Information from the external environment is stored as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory (VAKOG) data in our brains. Our prefrontal cortex assigns meaning to the information, primarily by generating beliefs.
4. If the feeling assigned to the information (person, place, thing, or activity) is bad, then the meaning we make of that information will be, “It is bad.” Similarly, if the feeling assigned to the information feels good, then the meaning we make of the information will be, “It is good.”
5. Human beings will reach only for the best available feeling on their menu. If we want to change behavior, we must add new and better feelings to the menu, not remove bad ones.
• We must understand how we create our experiences in the world, and that starts with understanding our emotions.
• Feeling more powerful is not about turning off our emotions or ignoring them. It’s about making choices. It’s about making better emotions available.
• It’s time for us to feel more powerful—not in having power over others but in having power over our own experience and emotional state.
• Change and growth depend on making sure that the Smart State—not the Critter State—is driving management decisions and behavior.
• If we want to change behavior, we must add new and better feelings to the menu, not remove bad ones.
See this chapter’s section on www.PowerYourTribe.com for the following:
• Chapter Quick Summary video
• Culture and sharing values examples
• Create the Culture of Your Dreams video
• Leading from the Inside Out kit
• Your Awesome Brain and How It Works video