Interview about The Success Zone and its application on ABC Gippsland: extract of an interview with presenter Celine Foenander.

Coincidentally, before this flight I went into my daughter’s bedroom looking for a book to read on the flight and my daughter, like me, is an avid and wide reader. I picked up Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” which contains two essays, one about Huxley’s experimentation with the mind altering drug mescalin and the second about how we open our minds to new thoughts or visions. At the risk of simplifying too much, he argues that our minds are open to new thoughts (amongst other conditions e.g. low sugar through fasting) when the oxygen level falls or the carbon dioxide level rises in our brains. This occurs, for example, through singing or chanting such as achieved in churches (when chanting we tend to breathe out more than we breathe in thus depleting our oxygen levels) or, as many traditions do, through meditating at the top of a mountain … or in a plane.

As a trade off between hull strength and human survivability, planes are designed to have an internal atmospheric pressure equivalent to being at about 8,000 feet above sea level once they are sealed and up in the air.

So, unbeknownst to me I have been putting myself 20 odd hours at a time in the perfect state to have new thoughts, visions and insights, just after I have had a range of new inputs, ideas and experiences. The perfect conditions to crystallise new thinking. On this particular flight everything has been enhanced as it is an old 747 with no backseat screens and, in any case, my whole audio/visual display controls are not working, including the overhead light! So I am sitting in the dark half dozing, half thinking as insights form in my head.

I wonder if this works for other people as well!

Given the limits to our attention and the high competition for that attention by many things in our day to day life, the brain has a process whereby it cycles through high demand priorities. We call this attention priority, a mind process where the most pressing attentional needs rise to the top, much like the way blobs of lava rise and fall in a lava lamp. Once the demand decreases, that issue ‘cools’ and falls out of our attention awareness. If left to its own device, the mind will be cycling through a range of attention priorities depending on you habits, needs and desires.

There is a high energy cost to holding things out of this natural cycle – like paying attention to a speaker for more than thirty minutes – and the attention priority cycle will sneak back in whenever it can. We notice, in presenting workshops for instance, that if the temperature of the room becomes uncomfortably cool, the need of being comfortable rises above attending to us in terms of attention.

The thing is, while you remain unaware of this, you are largely unable to harness the incredible power of this process. You are slave to you habits, needs and desires. We even have our rational brain keep this state in play for us with justifying statements like “I don’t have the time to do this right now”. If fact, if you have ever stopped to think about this statement, a common one when we are faced with things we’d rather not do, why is it that some people find the time to do the tough things, and others do not? We all have the same amount of time – it is just that some of us do not prioritise in the same way.

There are a number of deliberate and intentional ‘tricks’ that are used to construct a different attention priority than our habits, needs and wants would have. Tricks such as affirmations and goals, for instance, allow us to hold at the top, in spite of the habituated priorities, new priorities that without effort would fall back to the bottom of the pile. Do this once – say by writing down your goals for the year – and for a while your brain can hold this as an attention priority. Soon, however, the energy cost of holding these goals at the ‘top of mind’ allows other needs, wants and habits to resume the cycle.

The best way that you can harness attention priority is to wire your preferred future into desires, needs and habits. Do this with intention by:

• Speaking to as many people as you can around your passion, goals and future
• Writing and reading your goals on a daily basis
• Affirming daily the future you wish to create
• Reading as much as you can in your niche or field …
• … then writing and speaking from your learning and perspective
• Increase your scope of absorption by being in the best mind state – the Blue Zone.

Next time you catch yourself saying “I don’t have the time to do that” reframe it into “it is not a priority for me right now” (because, simply, it is not). Check on your emotional energy when you reframe – things that should be a higher priority will let you know!

The most recent definitions of leadership describe leaders as people who create the conditions for others to succeed. The example par excellence of this ought to be teachers – as parents we want their whole focus to be on creating the conditions in which our children can succeed and to succeed our children need to learn to be leaders.

Like many types of leaders this is not where teachers originated in the modern era, rather teachers were employees of the state charged with creating conforming and well-schooled children who would fit into the industrial (and military) needs of the state. It was the prohibition on corporal punishment (in the 1980′s in Australia, for example) that signalled society’s desire to radically change the purpose of schooling. This change in purpose demanded, and still demands, a different type of leader, a different type of teacher.

Organisations that take leadership seriously know that there are a number of basic rules to developing a strong leadership culture. The first is to recruit people who have developed leadership capacity to a minimum level. This does not necessarily correlate with high academic (i.e. cognitive) ability so should be evaluated separately, the leader needs both. Second is to give these new leaders the right experiences, increasing in challenge, at the right time, to allow the gradual development of capacity – leadership requires practice and experience. Third, young leaders need good role models and mentors so that they know the attitudes and behaviours that distinguish the leader from the follower and receive the assistance they need as they develop.

If we look at education systems around the world then none come to mind that follow the first basic rule, they mostly select on (sometimes minimal!) academic ability. This shows itself when young teachers enter the classroom. Those who have achieved the minimum level of leadership ability find that they can engage the class (i.e. lead!) and teaching and learning readily take place. The teacher continues on this track and, with engaged students, can take risks with their practice and develop strongly, often into outstanding teachers. Those young teachers who have not reached a minimum level of leadership find that they cannot engage their students and turn to using methods of control (which is what most other teachers are doing). Less teaching and learning can take place – some students are simply disengaged – but with persistence the teacher develops into a competent teacher, good classroom control and sound, if unexciting, instructional practices. But this teacher is not a leader yet today is in the vast majority.

Without breaking this cycle, giving people the right experiences at the right time has little effect, once teachers are developing as managers rather than leaders this is hard to shift. Similarly, if most of the teachers are not developing as leaders it is hard to have appropriate role models for the less experienced teachers so the cycle continues.

This cycle can be broken by senior leaders providing role models for other staff. It is well established that an outstanding principal can transform a school and this is how, by modelling the behaviours and attitudes of a leader.

If we want to transform our education systems then we need to (1) develop the senior leaders who are in place to be leaders (our work has shown this can be done) and (2) recruit new teachers who have reached the necessary minimum levels of leadership. Both of these changes are achievable – if we want to have education systems that help all our children succeed.

The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.

Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.

The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.

One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?

As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!

Leaders are critical in creating this successful mind state in their employees and they do so by how they engage with each one, some directly but most indirectly. An employee moves into this mind state when they are accepted, believed in and listened to by others, and critically by their leaders.

Acting against this are two interesting and well documented phenomena about positions of power. The first is that when people are in positions of power they find it hard to see the needs and actions of the people who are below them. The second is that people below them see with startling clarity everything that their leaders do and say, this is sometimes known as hyper vigilance.

This comes to the main point. Most leaders, like most adults, will have people they like, people they are indifferent to and people they dislike. Most effective leaders would say that they are polite and open to each group but spend more time with the people that they like. From the point of view of creating a successful organisation, it would make more sense for leaders to spend time with people who need their time (irrespective of whether they like them or not) but the first point above indicates that it is quite hard for a leader to know who needs their time. The second point above indicates that people below the leader will know with clarity who the leader cares about and who they don’t care about. Those the leader cares about will tend to be more successful, the others will be less successful or even fail.

It is worth exploring where like – and its opposite dislike – comes from. Essentially they come from three main sources: memories laid down in early childhood, projection of things we like/dislike about ourselves or associations with real experiences that we have had.

The first may need some explanation, explicit memory only begins after about 2 years old so we spend the first 2 years of our lives laying down emotional memories that are unlinked to explicit memories. What this means is that we can have a strong negative emotion because someone made a loud noise next to us as a baby. The fact that this person had certain facial characteristics can mean that thirty years later we can see similar facial characteristics and our memory triggers a negative emotion and we interpret this as dislike for the person.

In each of these cases the negative feeling that arises comes out of memory – not from the other person – and in certain mind states will trigger a cascade of further emotion. As people – and particularly as leaders – we can ignore the negative emotions and engage with a person completely as a person, and importantly, with practice we can learn to do this automatically, with little conscious effort. This allows us to engage with everyone on an even keel and determine whether they need our time or not. Thus we can extend the number of people we are helping to succeed.

When I started looking at the education system back in 2001 this was one of the things that really jumped out at me. I was interviewing teachers at a school and one of them clearly fell into the outstanding category – when you saw her around the school she was always surrounded by a gaggle of students who clearly loved to be with her, the principal confirmed that she delivered above average results – and she clearly loved to teach. One thing she said to me really struck a chord: “In my thirty years of teaching I have never had a discipline problem yet in this school there are two or three teachers whose sole objective on entering the class room is to survive to the end of the lesson”. I thought, how can we have practitioners of a defined body of knowledge performing at such extremes and, worse, no-one could tell me why!

The interesting thing is that it is often a single event or instance where these teachers had a major impact on us. The latest neuroscience research indicates why this might be the case. Say we are at a critical juncture in our lives, for example, we feel that we want to do something – break away from the norm – but we are not sure. An outstanding teacher provides us the confidence to make the choice and this confidence is powerfully impressed into our memories. Subsequently, when we have a similar decision to make – or we need to persist in the original decision against resistance – then that powerful emotion is recalled and it gives us the confidence to move ahead.

A key to being successful, then, is to get close to such teachers. We can see this happening when students choose subject options in years 9 or 10, they will often choose the subject based on the teacher giving it rather than on the subject itself. Schools often try to prevent this!
An obvious corollary to this is that the key to a successful school is to have a higher proportion of outstanding teachers than the average. Imagine a school where 50% of teachers were outstanding, rather than 5%.

Common characteristics of these teachers tend to be: “they listened to me”, “they believed I could succeed”, “they accepted me – they didn’t judge me, even when I made a mistake or did something wrong”, “they were passionate about their subject”.

Our own research, the basis of all our work, in fact, is that it is just these attitudes and behaviours that make the difference and, we now know, they can be learned. So teachers can learn to be outstanding.

What if our schools were set up for teachers to learn to be outstanding at the same time that they are teaching our children?