Understanding your thinking process  

Did you know you that as a senior executive, you and your team receive around 11 million pieces of data in to your brain in each moment? All this data goes into the back part of your brain which has a filter mechanism. After filtering the data, it only sends through about 50-100 bits to the front part of your brain. This means, for each moment we don’t get access to the whole initial load of data. It’s critical, as an executive leader, to understand this when you’re trying to improve your thinking.

You and your leadership team are using the unconscious part of the brain and it starts tossing out bits it thinks we don’t need. We’re completely unaware of this process happening. So, while we think we’re experiencing all of our reality, we’re only getting about 0.0001% of reality to consciously consider.

So, as executive leaders your reality is distorted, deleted and generalised. Imagine it like this- if life is giving us a page of information every second, we only see a dot from the whole page. It’s mind blowing to contemplate how much data isn’t being passed through to our consciousness. Every situation has good and bad in it. We all have different ways of seeing the same circumstances.

Some executives are great at filtering for the bad. Executives are busy so they only see what they want to see.  Leaders look for evidence to validate their decisions, so they distort their reality.

If you’ve had a tough upbringing, you’ll be hypersensitive to what’s bad, so you’ll always be focusing on it. Your life tends to feel quittered and you wonder why. It’s because you’re always on the lookout for what’s wrong. Other executives only focus on the good and don’t understand why others are always thinking about the bad. Some leaders unintentionally flick between good and bad, their focus changes depending on the situation.

Everything we do in the EQ code is teaching leaders and their teams to deliberately shift what we focus on. To learn to work out which hundred bits we want to receive. It’s vital to be able to control the shift in our focus as leaders, because sometimes life quickly turns upside down, as we’ve seen withCovid-19. What we thought was good, starts feeling bad and what we thought was bad starts feeling good. If we don’t know how to change the way we filter information and the way we think, we’ll end up stuck in a negative life. Our business is stuck, our leaders and executives are stuck.

Changing your thinking pattern.

The way our brain filters information is by using a pattern. The pattern is called DDG which stands for: Delete, Distort and Generalise. Our Executive coaching programs include this awareness framework.

Delete: We delete pieces of data so we’re able to function. Pretty much anything that’s similar to the last few seconds is deleted. Also, you consistently deleted certain information in your life because it doesn’t matter. You’re familiar with deleting that type of information. For example, sounds of ticking clicks or pictures on the wall. Or it can be more complex, like deleting anything negative that someone says to you or your team.

Distort:  Distortion is a safety mechanism. Executives and all humans do this every single second. Imagine you’re walking and see a brown squiggly stick on the path, you only have 100 conscious bits of information to workout what you’re looking at. If the back part of your brain assumes the stick is a snake, you’ll look at it and think it’s a snake. Then the information that could make it a stick becomes almost invisible.

Generalise We must generalise to be efficient. If I have to describe every single cup separately, you wouldn’t be able to pass one to me because I’d be so busy describing each one. If I just ask you to pass me a cup, you know quickly and easily what to do. We’re taught the DDG pattern through our parents and our life experiences.

The patterns we learn might not be helpful. That’s why we need to be able to control the way we filter information. Then we’re able to change our thinking.

At InspireTribe our Executive and Leadership coaching programs assists individuals to become aware to these patterns.

Would you like to change your thoughts? Would you like to change your DDG pattern? Get in touch with Nikk to learn more about the EQ code today