Read Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders for Free Online

of the many successes that they have had. If you are a leader or manager, how do you proceed in life without being held back by the fears that those difficult times posed? How do you recover from the fears that mistakes amplify? How do you “take the hit” and not be discouraged? Where do you find the courage when things seem to be not working out?
    IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr., once said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate....” 8 Yet, this seems counterintuitive because nobody likes to fail, and the fear of failure can paralyze any leader. Here are some examples of fears that are relevant to leaders:
• Fear of failure— “My company will never be the powerhouse that it used to be. What if I fail again?”
• Fear of layoffs— “Will my company morale survive if I lay off so many people?”
• Fear of the recession— “Things are so bad. I may never be able to survive my losses.”
• Fear of success— “If I succeed, am I going to have to maintain this? How can I stay on top? People will expect so much of me. I can’t stand the pressure.”
    Thus, fears are an instrumental part of leaders’ lives and heavily influence the way they make decisions. When coaching a leader (or yourself if you are one), how do you go about doing this? That is, what is going on in the brain and why does this matter to leaders?
    If leaders are able to conquer their fears, they will be in a much better position to think and make better decisions. In addition, they will be able to influence their followers in more effective ways, as we will now understand. A series of experiments in brain science have elucidated how fear registers in the brain and why it is so important to understand how it does this.
     
    The Concepts
     
    The following concepts illustrate the impact of conscious and unconscious fear on the brain.
     
    Concept 1
     
    The amygdala, which is found deep inside the brain, lights up when we are presented with something fearful. The amygdala is not just a fear detector, however; it detects all emotions. It just lights up to fear because it processes emotions in order of their significance, and when fear is the most significant emotion in your brain, the amygdala will light up.
    When researchers presented fearful faces to subjects who were lying inside an MRI scanner, they saw that the amygdala lit up, 9 as shown in Figure 2.1 .
     
    Figure 2.1. Schematic representation of amygdala activation to fear
     

     
    Conclusion: When fear is the most dominant emotion on your mind, it taxes your unconscious brain, which usually does most of the fast processing of information for you. By taxing the unconscious with fear, you eat up valuable brain resources that could otherwise be used to build your business. Although we are not entirely clear about the complete significance of the amygdala lighting up, the evidence does confirm that the amygdala processes fear.
    For example, Jack B. is an entrepreneur who had left his secure job as a project manager to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. After he left his job, he started to read as much as he could about how to achieve entrepreneurial success. Although he learned a fair amount by reading, he constantly came across statistics about how unlikely it was to be successful as an entrepreneur. He put this aside, but every time he came across these statistics, they frightened him. In the context of this experiment, his amygdala would have activated, making him more anxious. As a result, his “unconscious fear wheel” would be spinning even when he was thinking about other things.
    This was the first level of knowledge that researchers had. However, what followed was even more impressive and astounding.
     
    Concept 2
     
    Researchers then wondered, if fear can activate the unconscious that’s one thing, but what if fear itself is unconscious? What if you are surrounded by bad news, dread, and fear all the time although you are not consciously thinking about it?