Whether you like it or not, emotions play an essential role in how you think, learn and perform. As a quick thought experiment, how many times do you have to touch a hot iron in order to learn the lesson ‘never touch a hot iron’? Once, maybe twice if you’re a slow learner! This is a simple illustration of a fundamental principle: the strength of emotion that accompanies an experience has a significant impact on what you take from that experience. For example, the emotional spike you get from burning your hand adds ‘resonance’ to the experience of reaching out for a hot iron, accelerating the learning process. Typically, we associate this effect with bad experiences thanks to our negative bias towards survival, which we spoke about earlier. It’s no wonder we become preoccupied with ‘not making mistakes’, a very limiting mode of psychology. This makes downward spirals (situations where one negative thought or action leads to another) very common in competitive environments.
But what if you could apply the same principle to positive experiences – thereby creating an upward spiral? I don’t mean ignoring mistakes or things done badly, I simply mean predisposing yourself to focus on what you can do rather than what you can’t do. For a brain designed around survival, this doesn’t come naturally; instead you have to condition yourself to this way of thinking. In order to do this you must be more deliberate in how you combine your thoughts and emotions – especially when you are analysing your performance. Therefore in this section we will look at techniques for using emotions to actually enhance your performance rather than limit it. But first it would be helpful to know how resonance works in the brain.
As you already know, every time a neural pathway fires in the brain, that pathway is strengthened, meaning that less energy is required to activate the pathway in the future. This is one of the key principles of neuroplasticity – our ability to learn, change and adapt. But this strengthening process isn’t just influenced by repetition; it is also influenced by resonance – the strength of electrical charge sent down the neural pathway. The greater the emotional significance of an event, the greater the resonance and the faster the pathway is strengthened.
This is the neurological basis of why we retain more information about events that have emotional significance for us. This is the basis of inspiration, motivation and pride, all essential ingredients in the recipe for achieving your greatest goals.
It is easy to think that people who consistently perform at the highest level are robots. At least from the outside they never seem to have a bad day; instead they remain disciplined, routined and focused. But their ability to be these things is really only part of the performance equation – emotions still play a huge role in their inner world. In my work with elite athletes, soldiers, musicians and business leaders, they generally all experience the full suite of emotions like the rest of us – disappointment, fear, frustration, anger, pride, satisfaction, excitement and so on. The difference is how they put these emotions to work.
Broadly, we have two ways of dealing with emotions – we can suppress them or reappraise them (work with them). This was brilliantly illustrated in a study where volunteers watched gruesome videos of animal slaughter and human surgery.1 Some were asked to suppress their emotional responses by deliberately not showing any disgust in their expression – this group were the ‘suppressers’. Others were asked to adopt the stance of a professional while watching the videos, by focusing on the technique of the surgeon, for example, as if they were going to be asked to carry out the procedure in the future. This group were the ‘reappraisers’.
Both groups reported that they felt less emotion when compared with a control group who just watched the films, but there the similarities ended. In the reappraisal group, the frontal lobes of the rational brain showed a surge of activity a few seconds after the video began (indicating thoughtfulness and focus), while at the same time the limbic system (emotional brain) reduced in activity. By ‘leaning in’ and making sense of what was happening the ‘reappraisers’ were able to stay effective in the face of potential emotional distress. In the ‘suppressers’ group, meanwhile, activity in the limbic system increased significantly. It would seem that by showing outward denial of what is happening (leaning away), you are actually stoking the emotional fire further.
Suppressing emotions without reappraising them increases adrenaline-linked arousal responses, including raised heart rate, blood pressure and skin sweatiness. It also lessens your memory of an event. Reappraising, however, doesn’t make the same sort of constant demands on the brain as suppression does. It’s why language such as ‘staying on top of our emotions’ isn’t always helpful.
Suppression has other costs, too. It is rather a blunt instrument, and because emotions such as fear, sexual arousal and anger have so many overlapping ‘symptoms’, suppressing a negative emotion almost inevitably leads to the suppression of other positive emotions. In high-performance environments this is problematic because positive emotions are essential to the way you experience reward and satisfaction, and therefore your ability to build confidence and learn faster. In addition, people whose style it is to suppress emotions rather than reappraise them don’t share their emotions with other people nearly as much as reappraisers do. They are therefore less likely to seek help and support and are, on average, less well liked by other people. This is because we tend to trust and like people who are open and self-disclosing.
These findings challenge many preconceptions about what it means to be emotionally resilient. They also suggest you can absolutely use dominant emotions like anger, but only with great care and to a clear purpose.
I have already introduced the concept of visualisation. We specifically spoke about it as a tool for rehearsing skills and techniques, but it is also an essential tool for developing our desired emotional response to a meaningful situation.
A great example of this comes from the world of financial traders. The essence of making money on the stock market is about making rational decisions based on the likelihood of stocks going up or down. As with any other performance, the success of traders relies upon having a mental blueprint to guide their rational process – this is known as a ‘trading plan’. By having a clear rationale for when they buy a stock and when they sell a stock, they should be able to factor for any unexpected moves in the market, thereby allowing them to manage risk. But, just like any performance athlete, they too are susceptible to emotions when markets rise and fall suddenly, and these emotions distort how well they adhere to their plan.
Importantly, the best traders tend to recognise emotions as part of the ‘experience’ of trading, choosing to work with them rather than deny them or fight them. Interestingly, this defensive denial of emotions is something that has been shown to be more prevalent in younger, less experienced traders.
Visualisation becomes a great tool for helping traders work with their emotions and maintain clarity of thought in chaotic market conditions, or when they have multiple trades open at the same time. Using the trading plan to play out various scenarios, good traders ask themselves: ‘When the price is at a different level from where I want it to be, how am I going to be feeling, what am I likely to be thinking and what will I be doing? Am I a buyer or a seller at that level? I know I will have to be one or the other. Once I have worked this out and tested myself against my own level of pain, then I can proceed, knowing that if the price ends up there I will be familiar enough with the emotion to make the right call.’
This form of mental preparation is a natural extension to your blueprint and helps you to prepare for the full range of emotions you may experience in different scenarios. As demonstrated in this example, emotional planning is a critical tool if you wish to control your mind when you arrive at an important juncture. We will look at this further in the Feeling Dimension when we explore expanding your comfort zone.
So how else can you work with emotions to create an upward spiral rather than a downward spiral? The answer to that can be found on the ski slopes of the Alps, the playground for one of the most skilful and daring athletes I have worked with – a freestyle mogul skier.
As if skiing over moguls isn’t hard enough, freestyle moguls include ramps at regular intervals down the course from which skiers launch into the air and perform aerial stunts of varying difficulty. The moment they land they are straight back into the punishing moguls, their legs working like shock absorbers and their hips twisting left and right at unbelievable speeds. Athletes are measured both for their speed down the course and their air (jumps). Freestyle mogul skiing is a unique mix of brutal physicality with creative flair. With their bodies running high on a cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins and dopamine, their response at the bottom is very often one of either total jubilation or total desolation, dependent almost entirely on whether they landed their jumps or not. There’s very little in between.
I soon noticed that when athletes land a good routine they would want to go and share it straight away with teammates, coaches and fellow competitors, but if they didn’t, they would want to be on their own, ruminating on what they did wrong. Over many repetitions, this has a marked effect on how the brain is processing and learning from experience. By dwelling on mistakes while experiencing negative emotions such as disappointment and regret, it charges and reinforces these negative pathways in the brain. Conversely, when an athlete nailed their routine, they would be less inclined to review and reinforce what went well. This is analogous to how we all deal with success and failure, but with a little pre-thought you can put these positive emotions to better use.
The first ingredient for doing this is making feedback specific. Raw emotions are fairly unhelpful to us unless they can be channelled into specific lessons or actions. Think about how you would react to the following two statements.
Well done, you did an amazing job today.
Sounds good, right? We would all like more of that in our lives. But how useful is it really? It will probably give you a warm, fuzzy glow for a little while, but once this has worn off, what does it leave you with?
How about this statement?
Well done in your presentation today. Your eye contact with the audience was excellent and it made them feel really engaged. Your arguments were also exceptionally clear and compelling. It was definitely worth the time you spent preparing.
Here, the same feeling of pride and satisfaction gets channelled into very clear pathways for success and you can guarantee that next time you are doing a presentation you will want to do the following things well:
By taking the time to compile this feedback, you have applied resonance to specific behavioural pathways in the brain, and, just as with the hot iron, you have accelerated their development. Therefore the feedback you give yourself should be defined less by whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and more by whether it helps you to channel your effort. Put simply, it must be as specific as possible. I have to confess, it took me a while to write that second statement because it’s hard work making feedback specific! But with effective feed-forward (using the left-page–right page technique), feedback should be one of the easiest parts of the Thinking Dimension.
This is a principle that I had the opportunity to apply with positive effect with the executive team of a large independent retailer in Ireland. I’ve always really enjoyed working with retail teams, I think because it’s very close to working in sport. The environment is extremely results-driven and competitive. Sales are easily and quickly measured, therefore every decision about every product on the shelf is quantifiable and easy to test. The figures speak for themselves, which inevitably creates winners and losers. Managers take advantage of this by constantly setting new targets for their teams to beat in an attempt to spur them on and sell more. When targets are hit and competitors are beaten, there’s a palpable sense of reward and satisfaction. Until the next target is set.
In this fast-paced environment, emotions can run rampant through the corridors of power. Technology now allows information to pass from till to CEO almost instantaneously – revenue per hour, percentage gains and losses year-on-year, stock count, average spend per customer, the list goes on. Each member of the senior team is drip-fed a constant stream of data coming through on their mobile phones. Without the appropriate discipline, they can easily turn into results junkies, allowing their emotions to be dictated by the numbers. These are the kinds of techniques used in psychology labs to induce ‘learned helplessness’, a condition in which, rather than controlling the situation, you allow the situation to control you. In the case of this particular business, the Outside-In effect was being exacerbated by the wider economic downturn and a global shift in how consumers purchased their goods, moving from high street to online.
It was in the Monday morning executive team meetings that we decided to target this particular downward spiral. What had been happening was that the team would start off by discussing results from the previous week – good or bad. Departments wanted to know how they ranked and therefore how they were ‘performing’. Very often, this led to a conversation about needing to do better, after which they would set targets for the upcoming period … and so the cycle continued. Staff on the shop floor would wait in anticipation to see what version of their manager would return from the weekly update. As the business struggled more and more, this created a downward spiral that was difficult to break free from. Morale was affecting performance on the shop floor, and the performance on the shop floor was affecting morale.
In order to break this cycle, our first step was to ban any data from the Monday morning meeting until such time as the cycle had been reversed. Instead, it was all about defining intent – feed-forward. Each department head would decide exactly where they wanted to apply their attention and the specific controllable goals they would go after in the upcoming few weeks. It was essential to get strong traction in a small number of areas rather than trying to control everything – they all needed to feel a victory on some level.
The next Monday, sales figures were kept off the table and instead each member of the team had to remind the others what they had committed to the week before. The question was simply: Have you done what you said you were going to do? What impact is it having? What feedback can you offer each other to help bolster this effort? ‘Left-page’ goals were renewed before they went about the new week, again focusing on intent rather than outcomes.
As the weeks went on, small victories started to build. Negativity and reactivity gave way to positivity and proactivity. Positive emotions gave them the opportunity to dig into these victories, to amplify their resonance but also to reinforce specific actions and behaviours that were working. As competitive as each department was, the victories were shared – ‘all ships rise in a high tide’. Before long, the sales data was reintroduced into the equation, but only if the outputs could be connected to clear inputs from the previous week.
Remarkably, by bringing the team together around victories rather than defeats, they started to communicate far more openly with one another, they demonstrated more compassion and patience with their staff, and they gave each other much more encouragement and positive feedback. This lifted the shop floor, giving everyone permission to focus on day-to-day deliverables without worrying about outcomes they couldn’t control. Less reliant on the output data to tell them whether they were doing a good job, they became far more intuitive around the inputs – leading to one of their most successful years in recent history.
The message here is very simple and translates to all performance environments: don’t let success go to waste. This is about more than simply celebrating success – it’s about understanding it and reinforcing it. Only by doing this can you create upward spirals.
In the next part of the book, we explore the Feeling Dimension and the incredible interaction between your psychology and our physiology (mind and body). Here we expand on the role that emotions play in our search for peak performance, we explore the limits of our ability as well as how to cope with periods of prolonged intensity. You will learn how to recondition your body’s response to challenge and, with it, how to expand your comfort zone.