The ability of your brain to give you the niggling feeling

Fear, Focus, Human Brain, Thinking, Worry

I am writing after a long time related to the brain functioning. This comes from he fact that I get to hear a lot of times and I am also a culprit sometimes, that I end up saying – “I did not have the time”. Or even if you don’t say it in the open, you are overwhelmed and always under pressure because you have so many things on your plate.

A lot of this whole situation arises because we are being reactive to our circumstances. Whether its the email which comes in – complaining about a problem or a phone call giving us a new requirement or even just a person interrupting us, asking if we have a minute. Suddenly you get pulled one after another into tasks that were not planned for the day. I have had the habit of keeping a To-Do list for many years, but by reacting to all these interruptions, the To-Dos only kept growing longer.

Now to top that when I try to switch off my phone or switch off my email, I have this constant fear, a niggling feeling, that there’s a disaster waiting to happen on the other side . Now my brain is designed to ensure my survival, so it will always keep warning me about impending danger. So what happens, its even more difficult to concentrate on a task. This happens because of the Zeigarnik effect and the lizard brain which still resides inside us.

One thing which I learnt from Dean Jackson is to do a brain dump for a concentrated 50 minutes, from time to time. I have mentioned this earlier also – please watch his YouTube video on the Fifty minute focus finder. Its an amazing detailing on how you can become more productive. I keep going back to that video from time to time and each time I watch it, I learn something new to make me less reactive.

This brain dump does help the brain become a little more restive, because it realises that I have put out the things on paper so I will execute on it. Its a very relieving exercise. But you need to do it without any kind of distraction.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Pain & Gain – the pivot for messaging

B2B, Fear, Human Brain, Marketing, messaging

Its general human psychology that people avoid pain (fear of) and go for the pleasure / gain. People remember the pain forever or almost forever while they discount the gain. You lose a dollar and your brain will remind you about it for a longtime, but if you earned / won 10 dollars, your brain will discount it by saying it was luck.

This is the same logic why people don’t have a Vitamin C tablet which costs a few cents everyday as a preventive measure but go out and spend thousands of dollars when they get hospitalised. The pain & fear makes them spend the large amounts but the idea of spending a few cents and “gain” the positive of good health.

When you do messaging – whatever kind – an advertisement, a video, a webinar or individual sales – you have to keep these two emotions and their relative importance in the brain , in mind, if you want to get your message to stick to your audience. So while the negative or the message of pain will get more attention, you put too much of negative and it becomes dreary.

In every audience there will be people who are reactive since they are in pain and get your message immediately. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who are proactive and want to ensure that they take care of things before anything can go wrong, they plan in advance. Then there’s a large section of the audience which is sitting in between these two ends. The challenge of your messaging is to take this mass of people to either side of the spectrum so that they buy what you are selling.

Generally its easiest to sell to a person who is in pain or recognises the pain, then the set of people who are proactive. Then you should aim for the audience in-between. In case of B2B if you are selling an ERP software, then the ones whose production is completely messed up on one side, while there’s dead inventory lying on the other side, would be the ideal set of people to target first. The next set of companies to target would be the ones who are thinking in terms of growth and want to ensure that they are ahead of the curve.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Saying goodbye to 2021

learning, Learning, mindset

It’s already 2022 in Australia. In India we have about 3.5 hours to go before we ring in the new year. I was having a few perspectives as we do the countdown.

While things started of quite well in January this year, by the time it was April we got hit with the second wave of COVID-19. It was lethal. In India, with such a huge population, the complete infrastructure of the health system was taken by surprise. The speed with which it infected people was amazing.

A lot of us, lost some near and dear ones during this phase and it was a very painful period. I am generally a very optimistic person, but if you read my posts of that time, you may see a person trying to fight the depressive times and sometimes not being optimistic.

But after June things changed almost like a V and we had a lot of positive things happening.

This year has thrown up a lot of learnings for me and my team. While we have generally been locked in for a major part of the year, we have also learnt to appreciate what we have available to us in spite of all these challenges.

We have also been working on how in the changed environment with changed dynamics of human interaction we still do business.

I think all of us will come out stronger to handle the future better.

To all the readers and followers of this blog Wish you a Healthy and Happy New Year 2022.

Look forward to being of service in the new year with some more value adds.

Carpe Diem!!!

Fear of humiliation

Fear, Human Brain, Worry

Human beings have been designed to be social animals. Our ancestors used to live in groups so that they were protected from wild animals which were much bigger and more dangerous then them. This meant that the our ancestors had to conform to the group rules to stay together.

Being thrown out of the group would also mean being killed by an animal so dangerous.

So being thrown out was not only humiliating, but the humiliation could become life threatening.

So today our brain still carries the wiring of our ancestors It does not want to get humiliated because then we will be thrown out of the group and the wild animals can kill us. Our survival is at stake.

As I have mentioned many times before our brain is primarily wired for our survival only. The moment it senses a threat to the survival it starts giving resistance. So because of that resistance we try to avoid doing anything new because if it fails it can be Humiliating and that can be a problem of survival.

Have you had your brain give you all the dire consequences of an action you have taken. It is this same feature repeating.

What the brain is not recognising is the fact that today, there’s no survival issue in more than 99% situations. We live in a much more safer environment than before.

That’s one of the reasons that entrepreneurship has been found to succeed in clusters with first generation entrepreneurs. Because then a failure is only seen as an experiment and the social system around you does not ostracise you. The brain feels more comfortable taking risks.

On the other hand if you come from a business family, then entrepreneurship is considered a given and therefore the children don’t even think in terms of failing in taking/starting a business. While people whose parents have traditionally been in service dominated home tend to stick to being in services.

What all our brain can do!

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!