Prof. Steve Peters is a Consultant Psychiatrist working in elite & Olympic sport, business and education. His specialist interest is in the working of the human mind and how it can reach optimum performance applied to all walks of life.
I have found his best selling mind management book ‘The Chimp Paradox’ to be a great coaching tool.
The key premise of the book is that by understanding how your mind works,you can improve the quality of your life both professionally and personally.
The model explained in the book helps you to understand your mind and manage your emotions and thinking.
The approach is grounded in the principles of neuroscience. The mind is a remarkable machine that represents our greatest asset and our biggest liability. This machine is what inspires us to pursue our dreams and goals, and at the same time it can sabotage us and stop us from doing the things that we want to do, and also from being the person that we want to be.
This paradox often leaves us feeling confused, especially when trying to understand why we can so often be our own worst enemy. By understanding the rules, you can then learn to operate your own mind to maximize your potential.
The book is divided into three parts:
Part 1
Your inner mind explored
Part 2
Day to Day functioning
Part 3
Your health, success and happiness
Part 1
Your inner mind explored
This section explores many of the reasons why we often find ourselves in internal conflict and discusses why the ‘battle within’ is often the most challenging one that we will ever face.
The reason for this as that in extremely simplified terms, we have a system of seven brains which all work together to make us function. Of these,we use three areas of the brain to make conscious decisions in our daily lives, which Dr Peters categorizes together as our ‘psychological mind’. These three psychological brains are known as the:
Frontal brain (Human, logical)
Limbic brain (Chimp,Emotional)
Parietal brain (Computer, Storage of information for reference)
Sometimes, the brains align together , however often the frontal and limbic brain are in conflict. This is because the frontal (human) brain and limbic (chimp) brain developed in the womb separately and then came together by forming connections. These two brains have independent personalities with different agendas, ways of thinking and modes of operating.
The solution to effective self-management is therefore to recognize when you are in ‘chimp’ or ‘human’ mode in order to make sound and helpful decisions.It is the emotional(chimp) brain which is the most powerful and which has the ability to hijack your decision-making.
As Dr Stevens highlights as a key point:
‘One of the secrets of success and happiness is to learn to live with your chimp and not get bitten or attacked by it.To do this, you need to understand how your chimp behaves and why it thinks and acts in the way that it does. You also need to understand your human and not muddle up your human with your chimp’.
The Parietal brain is the storage area which stores all of the information that the chimp and human has put into it. The information is then used to act for you in an automatic way or it can serve as a reference point. The parietal brain does not independently ‘decision-make’ for you. It only acts on whatever thoughts, feelings and beliefs that have been stored in it by your chimp and human; information that we now know can be non-aligned and contradictory.
If you can understand that the chimp brain will always work with feelings and impressions and that that the human brain will work with facts, logic and truth, this is a great startpoint. Also be aware that external signals coming into your brain will always go to the chimp brain first and that the chimp brain is five times more powerful than the human brain. You cannot wrestle with a chimp, you can only manage your chimp but it is always YOUR CHOICE whether you decide to wrestle with your chimp or dance with your chimp.
When you have a different opinion than your chimp around decision-making, the chimp is five times stronger than you and so will always take initial control of your thoughts and actions.However, if you can develop the self-awareness to recognize that this is what is happening and you have created strategies for managing and dealing with this, you will gain control of your thinking and then you can act in a logical and constructive manner.
As you reflect on how your coachees are thinking, feeling and acting around their actions and their goals, remember that the chimp operates by the laws of the jungle and it does this by having powerful drives and instincts.The human operates by the laws of society and it does this by using powerful ethical and moral drives, typically with a conscience.
Part 2
Day to Day functioning
This section explores how we relate to other people.
It covers areas such as how we can understand the mind and personality of others and different mindsets. As coaches, empathy has to be one of our core skills and I found that this section of the book was extremely helpful for me to consider my empathic understanding and reasoning of and with others and to consider certain scenarios which had been relevant to my own coaching experiences.
There is an excellent section on mindsets where two particular mindsets were discussed; the ‘Snow White’ mindset and the ‘Alpha Wolf’ mindset. The lists of typical behaviours and beliefs prevalent in these two mindsets and then the description of the helping tools available to shift people’s mindsets into a more productive place, were exceptionally useful.
The section on the assumptions we make about other people, particularly our first impressions, was also very helpful. When we use evidence, humans will typically look firstly for evidence and then draw up conclusions whereas chimps firstly draw up conclusions and then look for evidence. If you are actively listening with your coachee, simply following this method will allow you to see if your coachee is in chimp or human mode and then allow you to frame the right questions to move your coachee forward into more helpful territory.
I also enjoyed the content around ‘bridge-building’. It is a natural law that ‘if you want to build bridges with someone then it is you who have to build the bridge.Most people will return the bridge-building once you start the process’. I have coached many people around interpersonal conflict and particularly in the early sessions, this is often a sticking point. Dr Peters’s advice will bring you new strategies for helping your coachees appreciate and accept the fundamentals of the relationship bridge -building process.
In terms of communicating well with other people, I liked Dr Peter’s ‘Square of communication’.
The ‘Square’ says if you are looking for a decision or to get something done that involves others,you have to first be talking to the right person. Once you are talking to the right person,make sure that it is at the right time, in the right place, with the right agenda and in the right way. Simple stuff; but remarkable how many times this process is not followed with predictably unsatisfactory outcomes. As a coach, if your coachee is recalling a story to you, try and frame your questions using this square. When there is a problem, you will be amazed how often the problem is because this process has not been adhered to. If you can just work with this simple process, you will potentially have great success in helping your coachee move forward and remove blockages. In this process, when discussing your coachee’s agenda, ask them if this is their human’s agenda or their chimp’s agenda? This will produce fascinating insights and open up new options and opportunities for your coachees.
Part 3
Your health, success and happiness
The final section of the book discusses how optimum health and well being allows you to be fully functioning and live a happy and fulfilled life, with an abundance of meaning and purpose; surely the way we all aspire to live!
The first section discusses the concept of malfunction and dysfunction, pointed out the main features of both states and what we need to practice to find energy and flow. The key idea here is that we should not be battling to achieve our optimum state; we have to create a philosophy and a sustainable lifestyle around this so that it becomes a natural part of who we are and how we lead our lives.
Dr Peter’s thoughts around goal setting and action planning are very useful for coaches. We always goal set with our coachees however we can get frustrated by the pace of progress or transformational change that we see in many of our coachees. Dr Peters surmises that much of this is because of context and the unrealistic expectations that our coachees set for themselves. In his words:
‘Think carefully, you have a choice here. If you always wish to measure success in life by what level you attain, then you must accept the emotional consequences when you do not reach this level.If you measure success in life by effort and doing your best, then it is always in your hands to succeed and to be proud of yourself. You can then deal with any disappointing level of attainment as an adult human.’
For creating commitment around goals,Dr Peters uses an acronym of the CORE principle:
Commitment
Ownership
Responsibility
Excellence
I will leave you to read the book and discover more about the CORE principle if you so wish. It is a clever, accessible and practical tool and if you go through the steps in a linear way and spend time with your coachee in each step, I have found it to be a powerful way to gain commitment and motivation from my coachees. One of the points that Dr Peter’s stresses around this principle is that ‘when you decide to do something, remind yourself that it is commitment not motivation that matters’.
I also like Dr Peter’s description of the differences between a dream and a goal; sometimes our coachees dream; which is fine…as long as they themselves understand the difference. To quote Dr Peters again:
‘A dream is something that you want to happen but it is not fully under your control. The dream has outside influences and therefore you cannot guarantee that it will happen; it is just a wish.
Goals are something that you can set and achieve because you have full control of them.Goals increase the chance of dreams happening.’
I would add in here the general maxim to share with your coachees that in life, put your energy into controlling the controllables and do not lose sleep or create worry for yourself around things over which you have no control. Making peace with this idea will release many blockages that might be hindering your coachees ultimate path to change.
I always encourage my coachees to ‘chunk down’ and to break the actions needed to complete a goal into the smallest possible pieces. Dr Peters uses the well-known ‘climbing a mountain’ analogy where you climb the mountain in stages and celebrate reaching each new camp on the way to the summit. I like his addition here that when you reach each camp, you should always look back down to see how far you have come. NEVER ENCOURAGE YOUR CLIENT TO LOOK UP and see how far there is to go. Typically as humans, we do not spend enough time celebrating the achievement of each stage of the goal; however this is exactly what we need to encourage our coachees to do to build the motivation to sustain themselves all the way to the summit with our support and encouragement.
There are many other great pieces of advice on how to find happiness and about how to find friends that will be radiators for you rather than drains. He points out how easily we can fall into relationships that suck energy out of us and make us the very opposite of happy. I like this one very simple piece of advice that is always worth reflecting on as a coach:
‘ An ideal friend or partner is likely to:
- Make you feel good about yourself
- Help you develop as a person
- Bring out the best in you
- Put you first before themselves
- Accept you as you are’
Run this simple test past your coachee if they are questioning the quality of their relationships and how these relationships might be holding them back from becoming the person they really want to be. If they cannot tick off each one of these five pointers or they are hesitant with any of their answers, you then have the basis for an excellent coaching conversation.
There is an excellent section on the concept of ‘self’. This is made up of:
- Self-image
- Self-worth
- Self-esteem
- Self-confidence
How you view yourself can depend a lot on whether your chimp(emotion) or your human (logic) is doing the assessment.How you decide on your own image will always be predicated on how you are living out your core values, so make sure you know whether it is the chimp’s values or your values that you are basing your self-image around.
I have found in my coaching practice that whatever high level objectives my coachees originally come to me with, so often the real challenge is buried around one of these four cornerstones of SELF. The whole section on the book that covers this is invaluable to create the types of powerful questions that will allow you to enter the realms of your coachee’s SELF and to access ways of helping them as a consequence of this line of powerful questioning.
You can find out more about Professor Peter’s work and The Chimp Management model at:
By James Mcleod
