Managing Burt

Burt is the name of my daughters monkey. The part of her brain that is emotional, super quick, and amplifies the good in her life.

However, Burt does things with unintended consequences; he's the negative self-talk, the reactive one that talks without thinking first.

We all have our Burts.

At a young age, she learnt about the mindset and importantly, how to control it and manage the monkey part of our brain.

Plato called it an unruly horse; Daniel Kahnemann called it System 1 and System 2, Jonathan Haidt called it an elephant.

Dr Steve Peters called it a chimp. In his book the "Chimp Paradox" which I gave my daughter to read when she was 13 simplifies the brain for us into three distinct parts. The Chimp, like Burt, the emotional side, the Human the rational thinking part of the brain and the Computer, the system, automatic part of our brain.

Once we have an idea of how our brain works in a holistic sense, we are better placed to manage it.

The message from all these great thinkers is to manage the primitive chimp part of our brain, the amygdala.

Day to day when we have no pressures, the Chimp is relaxed.

However, when under pressure, the Chimp is like a jacked-up monkey on treble shots of caffeine, its wired, ready to respond.

In some cases, this will save our lives; in others, it will make trouble for us. Especially if we are trying to perform and be productive or to lead others to do so.

What the Chimp does when we are under pressure is it reduces our ability to think. Our bandwidth of all the strategies and ideas we could usually muster significantly reduces, which hinders our ability to make the right decisions.

We also fail to effectively execute the decisions as we are being driven by emotion.

Therefore you need to learn to manage your Chimp as your performance hinges on the right decisions being made and those decisions being executed well.

Quick Action:

Name your Chimp: It sounds funny, but this works, it conceptualises the Chimp, and you start seeing it as something that you can choose to listen to or not. If you hide the Chimp, you can never be conscious about the decisions it's making for you, taking away your choice, and therefore control.

What's your Chimp called?

Photo credit: Photo by Rishi Ragunathan on Unsplash