The Heart of the Beast?

Increasing your Presence and Power...

What you will find if you are honest with yourself, is that an emotional pull or push has been triggered and it is running you rather than the other way around. Most of us deep down know instinctively what we want for our desires, goals, dreams and ambitions. We are at times simply afraid to take control. And there are occasions even though we have set the course for our ambitions to be fulfilled, that something entirely different takes place, and we end up achieving the opposite of what we truly wanted. Lewis with all his heart and soul wanted to be F1 Champion in his debut year, it was not lack of skill that lost the Championship, not weather conditions, but rather his greatest strength - his emotional mind!

The latest brain research concludes that our emotions are the dominant drivers of our behaviour and not our thoughts. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist from New York University famous for his work on the brain's emotional systems, asserts that it is emotional learning and not intellectual learning that drives our actions and reactions, these emotional systems he calls emotional fields.

Some of these emotional fields are more obvious than others. For example, the person who was bitten by a large black dog when they were a child may feel unmitigated panic every time they see a black dog, even when they know it is friendly, (the emotional, not the rational thought is forcing the behaviour.) This can be the same with the fear of heights, but, it is more subtle when the emotion is the fear of picking up the telephone and making cold calls or asking for referrals.

Most of the time emotional fields are benign and sit in the background of our thinking unobserved, until they are activated. They are like an electric fence - until touched it goes undetected. Emotional fields are not negative or positive, they are sensations that stimulate and drive our behaviour, it is the outcome of the behaviour that brings us negative or positive results.

What is true here is that 'what we resist does indeed persist.' Test this for yourself by recalling a situation that was charged with negative emotion. For example, remember a time when you felt intense embarrassment (or make one up, it will still work.) Concentrate on the emotion that arises in you and notice how you want to push the feeling away. Because these emotional fields feel uncomfortable to us and at times alien, we resist them and try to escape.

Unless you are like the world class skipper Ben Ainslie. Ben knows, as does Lewis and Lindsey that the Beast must be faced and called to account in order to raise the bar and rocket their performance to new heights.

So, what does this have to do with Presenting, Selling or Building a Business... Everything! Emotions are what move us into action; or deny us the motivation to take action, they provide the energy behind all that we accomplish, or not. A negative emotional field that controls you takes away your choice and demands that you become reactive rather than responsive. At a profound level they are the architecture to how you think and impact all of the decisions you take and success you accomplish.