Book Review: The Mind Management Program for Confidence, Success and Happiness
Uses a simplified version of the human brain to describe the psychological mind:
Frontal / “The Human” - think calm, rational, logical and works with facts and truth.
Limbic / “The Chimp” - think emotional, irrational, angry or distressed. Works with feelings, impressions, instincts and drives.
Parietal / “The Computer” - stores information that the Chimp or Human has put in to it. Uses this information to act for them in an automatic way or as a reference point.
The importance of understanding instincts and drives:
Instincts are like the fight, flight or freeze response
Drives are what compel us to get up and do something
There is a constant power struggle between the Human and the Chimp.
The basic way emotions work is that the chimp interprets what is happening and then offers the human an emotion and a suggestion how to deal with the situation.
Part of the problem is that the human fails to realise that the chimp is making an OFFER and not a COMMAND.
You do not have to follow your emotions, you have a choice
As a human that wants to achieve success, it is vital that you learn how to manage your Chimp. You can do this in 3 ways:
Exercising / Express the Chimp. Pick the right person to do this with, someone who recognizes that this is your chimp letting go and ranting, and not you.
Box the Chimp using facts, truth and logic and giving answers or rationale to its crazy! Literally visualise putting your chimp in a box and closing the lid.
Distractions or rewards. Like a banana to the chimp. Like spring cleaning your entire house to avoid checking the phone to see if he texted. Or, “do these five emails and then you can have your coffee after that” as a reward.
5. The key differentiator between your Chimp, your Human and your Computer is their drivers:
Your Chimp - Survival
Your Human - A Purpose
For The Computer, its all about receiving and processing information from both the human and the chimp. An effective computer merges these two worlds and helps a person to switch between Chimp and Human constantly throughout the day.
6. How the Human, the Chimp and the computer work together:
If the Human and the Chimp are both relaxed and not worried, your brain will automatically work via your computer.
Your computer works the fastest because its already programmed and the more you rehearse things the more they become automatic responses. If we can get the computer to act before the chimp, we avoid the battle between Human and Chimp.
If any perceived danger appears, the Chimp or Human will wake up and take over
The trick is recognizing when this is about to happen, and intervening the Chimp with your Human. It’s almost like giving yourself a trip wire to trigger your recognition when your Chimp starts to enter the room. For me its usually a physical warning, the blood starts rushing in my ears if I feel attacked, I have trouble actively listening because of it and I immediately feel the urge to go on the defensive.
7. Personality Hijacks
The book poses an interesting view, that you are the list of things that you write down you want to be. This is who you are. Any deviation from this is a hijacking by the chimp.
It is crucial to understand that your chimps personality has nothing to do with you. You may have a very different personality from your Chimp!
8. How to chose the right support network
Who the chimp wants in the troop and who the Human wants in the troop are very different. Beware of letting your Chimp decide who you surround yourself with, because its usually based on superficial qualities instead of things like integrity, honestly and a positive outlook, which the human will recognizes as valuable.
9. Connection and Communication
Successful people don’t make demands of others but set the scene so that the Human in other can respond rather than their chimp.
The most constructive way to have a conversation with any one in your life, is for each human to have had a conversation with their chimp first. Then for each human to tell their own chimp that some of what they want is probably not reasonable and therefore not going to happen.
Just like Chimps can attack each other in the jungle, words can be used as one of the most powerful weapons of attack in the human world.
For example: “I hate Bob in accounting” verses “Im not too keen on bob in accounting.” The use of the work “hate” will invoke a very different, and likely stronger emotional response in your brain and in the person you are speaking to’s brain, then the other more measured sentence.
10. Not making decisions is one of the most common causes of stress on a day to day basis. If you are a person that struggles with making decisions, this book outlines a helpful and practical path to reasonable decision making:
Gather all the information possible to make the decision.
Accept that some information will never be available and some will arrive too late.
Look at the consequences of each choice.
Tell your Chimp to stop catastrophizing.
It won’t always be appropriate - but try and laugh at yourself and/or the situation.
If you still can’t decide, there can’t be much difference between the choices - toss a coin.