?? “The knee bone is connected to the … thigh bone” ?? (How our brain deceives us) …

Oh Bangers!

“I’ll be in the woods!” I shouted over my shoulder.

“OK, please be careful” Mum called after me. I looked back, she was smiling warmly and waving. She loved me, you could see it all over her face. I waved back with joy in my heart and the warm sun on my face.

The best way to see the banger racing was from the trees that surrounded the outer fence. I found a good one and shinned my way up 20ft, into a comfy nest of branches. The indistinguishable voice on the tannoy blended with the roaring of engines, crashing metal and the smell of welding, grinding and petrol.

Only a minute later, three older kids approached, shouting at me. They were going to beat me up. Apparently, I was in ‘their tree’. My sense of joy disappeared in an instant, replaced with gut churning fear.

Arms outstretched, I launched myself down, toward a branch. I could swing under it, and land far enough away, to give me a chance to run …

I can still hear the CRACK!’ of the branch, with that subtle echo you get in wooded areas, when you step on a dry twig…

But strangely, I don’t remember the fall.

I found out later, I’d landed face up across a tree stump … life changed. It was 1982.

Gym-carnage

“I can’t, it hurts too much”

“Where does it hurt?” … “my right hip!” … After 3 months of tender, patient training, to get my knee and shoulder moving, Steph, my wonderful PT, had asked me to lay on my back and pull my knees up to my chest. I couldn’t. The pain was unbearable.

40 years on, and here I was, on my back again. This time laying over an exercise matt, rather than a tree stump. I’d decided to try and get my body to move … if not properly, at least ‘better’.

I was weak since I had Covid … so much so, I’d nearly passed out when carrying Mum’s coffin. That scared me and I’d resolved to do something about it.

My inner voice was ranting! “52 isn’t old! I shouldn’t feel like this. I owe it to my kids to be more than this at my age.”

I’d always been a self-starter at the gym … but the more I learned about the brain, the more I realised, My brain could be tricking me in all sorts of ways … so, for the first time in my life, I asked for help with my approach to exercise.

I could never have imagined the lessons I’d learn from fixing my body!

Bouncing trees & blue lights

Blackness turned to light … tree-tops ... blurry … bouncing? … my entire view was just tree tops and blue sky … complete silence … I realised I was lying flat and being carried … no sound … darkness descended … the world faded.

The light seeped back in … sound this time … Mum was crying … she was scared … I’d never seen her like that … Dad was holding her up … it was blurry … darkness again.

What is that? Shiny … blue … I strained to focus … sun shining through the ambulance light … I can see it from underneath … I never realised you’d be able to see the roof lights from inside an ambulance … the rest of the world faded into view …

Mum, Dad, Paramedics … a line-up of faces… very worried faces.

The female paramedic says my name … I turn my eyes to her. She looks like my older sister. She has a kind face … she’s worried too and trying to hide it. “Can you move your toes for me love?”

They’re being careful with their words, but I know they think I’m paralysed. Always the clown, I try to relieve the tension.

“No problem, there you go” I say … She draws out a sound, that turns into “Ohhhh …. Kayyy, try again for me lovely”.

I say “I am”

… the sob that escaped, seemed to come from Mum’s very core.

I hear a voice from the front, it’s meant to be a whisper, but in the deafening silence, it’s like the guy is using a loudspeaker “No, we have to wait, there’s no movement in his legs yet”.

The lady who looks like my sister speaks again … “Right-oh cherub, no problem, we’re going to keep trying, it’s probably, just a temporary thing, it can happen sometimes, because of the swelling” …

“What happened?” I ask. My voice doesn’t sound the same. It’s foggy … distant. My jaw won’t move properly, I’m in a neck brace. “You had a fall love, from a tree, do you remember?”

“Yes”

“There was a stump of another tree … you landed on it … it’s given your back a nasty bump, so we need to check you out and see what you’ve done to yourself”.

“It’s OK” I said … “It can’t be that bad, I can’t feel anything!”

… stony silence wrapped itself around everyone.

10 minutes later, the 20th attempt to get me to move my toes see’s a flicker of movement. The palpable, terrible tension suddenly transforms into gasps of relief and tears of joy… even the chap driving the ambulance looked emotional.

“Right”, says the Paramedic … “now we can move you. Let’s get you to hospital and see what you’ve done to yourself”.

It was the first time I had been in an ambulance. My main thought was, just wait till the lads hear about this at school on Monday.

?? “The knee bone is connected to the … thigh bone” ??

“It’s all starting to make sense”

“Is it?” She asks.

“Yes, you’ve helped me see what we’re really dealing with. When I first came in, after knee surgery and Covid, I explained my knee problems … and my shoulder, that I broke mountain biking … but now the knee is stronger, the shoulder is more mobile and the pain has gone in both, it seems the ligaments from my hip to my knee shortened, pulling on the inside of my knee, because my hip is out of line, and that’s because walking like that, took the pressure off my back, after I broke it. I’ve been protecting myself from the pain for years and that’s led to these longer term issues!”

Steph said, “It’s amazing what length’s the brain will go to, to protect our body from pain” … and with that one statement, my brain pieced together experience spanning decades and a massive rock dropped into my stream of thoughts, to challenge my beliefs!

??

Framing and anchoring

“Can you turn on your side”

“P*ss off – I can hardly move my head or my arms!”

Instruction to ‘mind your manners’ from Mum and Dad were uncharacteristically ignored – these people were hurting me, they could stuff their requests to move where the sun didn’t shine as far as I was concerned!

Of course, all the bravado of a 12-year-old got me nowhere. They made me do it anyway, stressing how important it was and how they couldn’t give me anything for the pain in case it masked any symptoms.

I remember thinking “I should have taken the beating, it would have hurt less – that’ll teach me for being a coward!”

This was all happening in a ward in Broomfield hospital 40 minutes after my toe twitched in the ambulance. I’d recovered full control over my feet and legs, but now, I was trying to avoid the movements being asked of me. I was in abject agony.

Mum was curious more than furious.

“How exactly did you get it so wrong love? You’ve always been careful when climbing trees?”

Embarrassed of my cowardice, I outright lied. “I was just getting down to get a sandwich, the branch looked OK, I checked it, like Dad taught me, but it just snapped”.

My Dad knew something was up. He mumbled “That branch was obviously rotten”, then said more clearly “Good job those three boys were there to raise the alarm” …

“Were they?" I said, "I didn’t see any boys”

… he knew… he let it pass. Many years later, I told him. He hugged me … and we never said another word about it.

Six hours after the Xray, I walk out of hospital. Gingerly, but I was walking. The Xray’s didn’t show any damage, so I was discharged.

To this day, I don’t know how I got through the next day! It was Sunday. There was nowhere to run to get away from the all-encompassing pain coursing through my entire body, emanating from my back. I was allowed an aspirin.

The next day, Monday, Mum packed me off to school on my push-bike. It was a very slow 3-mile ride. Every leg movement was agony.

There was nothing wrong with me. The Doctors said so. They were the experts. I should stop making a fuss about nothing. There are plenty of people out there with real problems!

That was the primary response in the weeks and months that followed. I had to stop making a fuss and get on with it, I was annoying everyone and keeping myself in a bad head-space... apparently.

That’s how debilitating back pain became part of everyday life. Sometimes I was OK(ish). Most of the time I wasn’t. Once or twice every couple of months, something would catch and I’d be laid-up for a day .. or three .. having to crawl to the toilet and perform all sorts of stunts to have a wee and crawl back to the sofa.

It would then clear as quickly as it set-in and that was all the evidence anyone needed to convince themselves I was attention seeking, dramatic and putting it all on.

So I put up and shut up, as best as I could. Years passed and I started full-time work in September 1986.

A lot of my wages went on treatment from an osteopath. He referred me to a chiropractor. I saved up.

Out of the ￡48/week I earned, ￡8 was disposable after travel, rent and treatment. I eventually had enough & paid the ￡70 for X-rays from the Chiropractor.

The X-Rays were delivered to the consultation room.

“When did you break your back?” It was the first question I remember the Chiropractor asking me.

After my short explanation of events at the banger racing circuit and me assuring him I hadn’t broken my back, as confirmed by the Doctors at the time, he showed me shadows through the middle of 3 vertebrae. T6,7,& 8 I think.

He said, “the swelling probably closed this up at the time, but here, my friend, is where you definitely broke three vertebrae in your back. After a fall like that, you’re lucky to be walking!”

He went on to explain, that the shock to my growth plates had triggered a condition called Scheuermann’s Disease. My vertebrae were not meant to have all the lumps and bumps I was looking at on the Xray …

He explained, it was these bumps catching, that was causing my pain and sporadic immobilisation.

Not wanting to sound all doom and gloom, he also advised the lumps would ‘Wear away over time’, and I’d probably shrink an inch or so over the next decade, but the pain and problems would also reduce as the vertebrae smoothed out and stopped catching.

The rock in my stream.

The realisation dawned on me, slowly at first, but with increasing clarity the more I thought about it… and the more I went back to the gym.

As I increased strength and mobility, the more the evidence built to confirm the principal Steph had helped me see.

So what, exactly, did I realise?

I’d lived with pain for 18 years until I was 30 (ish). No treatment. It was the 80’s. You were expected to get on with it. So you did. I then ‘coped’ with reduced pain for another 20 years, while progressing my career and raising a family.

Despite the initial diagnosis, I had broken my back. I had suffered immense pain. Inevitably, my brain had protected me from that pain, as best it could.

What that translates into, is this. Over the years, I’d found ways to cope with restricted movement, which relieved the pressure at the pain points.

Working around the back-pain, led to my hip turning out, which ultimately caused my knee to wear out pretty early (48).

My brain had done all of that, and ‘normalised’ my strange ways of walking to such an extent, I was completely unaware of it, and blind to the bigger issue.

In my mind, I framed it as, “I’ve always had back pain”, “I’m not very flexible”, “I can’t do it, my body just doesn’t move like that” and other commentary that allowed me to hide from reality.

Discovering just how much I was immobile in certain joints was a shock and an eye (or brain) opener. When Steph asked me to do some pretty standard moves, like curl up in a ball, or bend over to touch my toes, put a sock on, or use an exercise machine, like a rower or leg press, I simply couldn’t do it.

My right leg would turn out, my lower back would curl to compensate for the top of my back being rigid, and I’d stretch my shoulders to make up the difference … I’d get there, one way or another, but my mobility and form were horrendous … the scary part is, I was completely unaware of it.

My brain deceived me about my own body .. what the hell is that all about? I mean … How is that even possible?

And that, dear reader, is our cue, to link this story back to business issues.

Our brain has the power to convince us we’re OK, even changing the way we move, think and perceive reality, to mitigate unwanted sensory stimulus, even within our own body … we can also convince ourselves we’re not overweight, that sitting watching TV isn’t that bad for us, there’s no damage done to mental health by social media and bullying facilitated by smartphones and navigating 25 different 'systems' at work isn't stressful etc. etc. (add in your own vice / technological nemesis).

If all of that ‘convincing ourselves’ is possible, in fact, probable, and there is growing scientific evidence to demonstrate the brain function behind it … surely, given that, we have to ask, just how much do we fool ourselves about ‘reality’ as we perceive it in our places of work?

If there are pain and pressure points in our business systems, and relationships causing damage and restricting our overall performance, just how much do our brains adapt our world view to accommodate those pain points … to find work arounds … to make excuses for them? Rather than addressing them and metaphorically, working through the pain?

After years of studying brains, I now know this is all pretty standard stuff. We all rely upon our avoidance tactics, defence mechanisms & coping strategies etc. to help us navigate the stormy seas of life, especially where the 'pain' has social and relationship origins.

Given that, we might ask, “What does good leadership look like” or “What does good change management look like?” or “What does good strategy deployment look like?”… and if our methods of leading, changing or following a plan, are found wanting, 1. do we acknowledge that? 2. do we fix it? or 3. do we just adjust to it?

Q. Are we, as a result of brain function, systematically ignoring the root causes behind the globally reported issues of disengagement, misalignment, resistance to change and stress? (See Gallop 2022 report)

The answer, through the neuroscience lens, is yes, inevitably, we are, we have to be, it’s how we’re designed. In addition, our brain is also great at convincing us we’re OK as we are. That's why we don’t see the problems with the system, from within the system, not even within ourselves … just as I failed to recognise the fact I was a wonky walker for 40 years.

We now have the neuroscience to understand all of this and do something about it.

So the final question has to be, "Do you know enough about the brains in your business?"