Your Brain, Thinking and Emotions in Producing Your Performance, Results and Situations.

Listen carefully,

There are three types activities and occupations

1.      Talent-based activities and occupations

2.      Knowledge-based activities and occupations

3.      Skills-based activities

In some activities and occupations, you need skills more than you need knowledge. For example in music and athletics, you do not need to know the intricate details for you to excel in the discipline.

You do not necessarily need to study music or a sport in order for your to excel in any of these two because they performance in this is driven my talent or a natural ability. In other words, study music or golf and getting a Ph. D in any of the two does not in any way turn you into a brilliant musician or athlete even you do not already have what it takes to be a brilliant musician or athlete. Music and sport are largely talent-driven. It’s either have the staff or you don’t. This is as simple as that and no amount of academic or intellectual learning can amend for that lack.

If you are an academic and you want a carrier in teaching, and whenever you want to teach for that matter, you cannot teach what you don’t know. To each something you must have what to teach in your brain, you must know it. But it is not always the case that you must know what you want to teach; you can teach from written texts such as books even if you do not have much prior knowledge although such teaching can be “dangerous” if your students ask you for clarification or depth.

There are many dimensions of knowledge that you must know to be highly effective I knowledge based activities and occupations but many people, surprisingly invest in knowledge but never bother to explore the subject of knowledge itself. For example, the overwhelming majority will be shocked if you asked them to define what knowledge is? They know what knowledge is but they will struggle to define it clearly. Many people are shallow in the theory of knowledge or knowledge about knowledge or metaknowledge.

In skill-based accusations and activities, we are talking about those activities that require the use of specific mental instructions to be successfully executed. Skills are about doing it and not just knowing it. The following are examples of skills-driven activities and performances;

1.      Operating a patient in the theatre

2.      Cooking

3.      Writing

4.      Delivering a speech to an audience

5.      Driving a vehicle

6.      Piloting an airplane

7.      Developing a plan

The Three Brain Level Producers of Your Performance, Situations and Results

In the final analysis only three processes directly produce all our performances, results and situations. These are,

1.      Thinking and

2.      Feeling or emoting

3.      Built in largely unconscious automatic responses

Your brain is responsible for your situations, your results and your performance. Yes, your brain. It is more accurate to talk about your performance and results in terms of your brain than to talk about it in terms of things such as

1.      Your academic qualifications or

2.      Your knowledge or

3.      Your experience or

4.      Your skills or

5.      Your expertise or

6.      Your academic title

Things such as your knowledge, experience, expertise and skills are only resources that your brain uses in the thinking and emoting that triggers, perpetuates, modifies or terminates our performances and our actions. The brain can act without any knowledge, skills, experience and expertise although such action is often dangerous and does not produce desired results in a predictable way.  At the brain level,

Results=Status-Quo Action or Breakout Action=Trigger X Switch X Reaction

1.      Status-Quo action will perpetuate the same old results or the same situation

2.      Breakout action will create a new or different situation, performance or results

A trigger is any stimulus designed to prompt the brain to initiate or terminate a situation specific, result-specific or performance-specific reaction. Any of the following can act as trigger for a specific reaction;

1.      An idea

2.      A verbal or written suggestion

3.      An emotion

4.      A thought

5.      A memory

6.      A sight (object or picture or image)

7.      A sensation

8.      A smell

9.      A noise

10.  Any major change in the environment

11.  Anything unusual or unexpected

A trigger acts on your brain switch. If the switch is responsive, the trigger will effect an appropriate reaction from the brain. If the switch does not respond, the brain will not respond to the stimulus from the trigger and it will remain operating as is without any change, sometimes for the good but many times for the worst.

You are approaching a cobra and the image of the cobra triggers a response. The trigger fires but your switch does not respond and therefore the signals are not registered by the brain and the brain continues to operate as normal. Unless the cobra runs away or does not active its automatic response to strange objects approaching it, you walk straight into danger.

If you brain switch is operating normally, once the trigger fires, your brain switch will also respond and switches the brain from the status-quo mode to a breakout mode and initiates the first, fast automatic responses to the image by initiative the first danger avoidance reaction which can either be a stop and assess or a jump away from the cobra or even downright run in the opposite direction. Now, listen again carefully, there are three main “wires” that the brain switch can connect to;

1.      The first is the negative live wire which prompts the object avoidance or object confront and attack response mechanisms and processes. In other worlds avoid the danger if you can or act to neutralise or eliminate it. It terms of the reptilian responses, eliminating the danger is not different from eliminating the object which is the source of danger. Now, I am not talking about a reptilian brain but your brain and mine. We have reptilian behaviours which, unless we modify them through our higher levels of cognition, we can and we do respond to stimuli the very same way reptilians do. Intentional murders are typical reptilian responses to stimuli!

2.      The second is the neutral wire which prompts no action at all, suggesting to your brain that all is well in spite of the new or unusual signals.  

3.      The third is the positive wire which prompts the object approach responses or positive responses to the stimulus. This is also called the “go for it” response.

The Significance of the Brain Operations in Real Life Situations

1.      There is an illusion that knowledge is directly responsible for our performance and results. Many people including very senior people in organisations and economies think that continuously increasing subject matter knowledge also directly improves performance. This over emphasis on knowledge is misleading because;

                                      Thinking X Feeling X Action=Results

Everything else such as knowledge, expertise and experience are important but they only support the thinking and the emoting and the action that produce all our results.

2.      Improving thinking and action and skills has a higher contribution to the improvement in performance and results and outcomes than improving in general subject matter knowledge. Yet rare are any programs and efforts at training and development. Much of what is called training is heavily skewed towards learning and knowledge acquisition rather than skills and capability building and also improvement in cognitive and emotional capacity and capability building.

3.      While there is a lot of hyperbole about talent, the disproportionately huge part of the corporate world and the world of economics do not higher and employ people on talent but on knowledge-based academic qualifications. It is surprising that in way into the 21st Century the overwhelmingly large proportion of the world still has embraced a new way of building organisations; which may is building organisations on absolute talent and strengths rather than on knowledge-based academic qualifications especially in organisations, positions and roles where academic knowledge is neither the core objective or the main driver of performance and results. There is too much underutilised talent in many organisations and economies because most do not have a correct and accurate enough understanding of talent and how to discover it. This is mainly because people are distracted by too much emphasis on knowledge-based academic qualifications as a predictor of performance.

4.      While thinking and emotions are the primary producers of performance, results and situations, very organisations and economies put a prime price on cognitive and emotional capacities and capabilities. There is almost zero focus on teaching, training and people development  the cognitive and emotional capacity and capabilities. Even with the advent of emotional intelligence, very few organisation ever commit even as less as eight hours on teaching the very basics of emotional intelligence to their staff. Where there is some emotional intelligence programs and courses, most are mainly basic awareness and not detailed programs that combine teaching and skills training and people development. The result is people will gain more knowledge on emotional intelligence but very little improvement and EQ-related behavioural transformation.

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?Simon Bere, 2022