Train the Brain. Tame the Lion.

Our amygdala makes sure we know when there’s a threat nearby. Good thing it does; it keeps us alive.

The problem is, the amygdala is so good at its job that it invents threats, even when our lives aren’t in danger at all.

This happens in the workplace all the time, where we see lions everywhere, in the form of cultural and individual differences that we find threatening.

How can we train our brains to make the amygdala less reactive, and learn to see our colleagues in more accurate and helpful ways?

Here are three brain-training strategies.

Brain-training strategy #1: “You make sense.”

I once had a direct report who told stories. Lots of stories. Early in our relationship, I found myself getting impatient as her stories dragged. I just wanted her to get to the point.

One time she caught me glancing at my watch, right when she was in the middle of a story. Busted! I hemmed and hawed and said I was sorry, but the damage was done: she could see I wasn’t that into her stories.

I knew I’d damaged our trust, so I did some thinking to try and understand why her stories annoyed me so much.

That part was actually pretty easy: I was busy, and I wanted her to get to the “now what” of our meetings more quickly, so that I could move on to whatever was next in my jammed calendar.

The harder part was the next step. I knew I didn’t want to just fake it and pretend to pay attention to her stories. I knew I needed to try to understand why she told the stories in the first place.

My intercultural training came in handy: she was a “high-context” communicator. Like most everyone, she wanted to feel seen and heard, especially by her supervisor. It was important to her that I understood what she did inside of the bigger picture. In this case, that meant narrating her tasks, along with some stories.

My own low-context, say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say communication style chafed at her high-context style. At least in the moment, it felt inefficient.

But now that I’d done the work of trying to understand her behaviors in the context of her values, she made sense to me.

Getting to “you make sense” is a brain-training win. It doesn’t mean I have to like anything I don’t normally like, or agree with something I don’t agree with. It just means I now understand better. It makes sense.

That’s all there is to it. It’s not hard, and it’s highly effective at calming the amygdala.

Brain-training strategy #2: Appreciate

Even more effective? Appreciating.

It’s not the same thing as liking or agreeing. We often stop ourselves from understanding or appreciating, because we’re afraid we’re going to somehow betray our own values, or lose a part of who we are.

We really don’t have anything to worry about. I can learn to appreciate classical music without choosing to listen to it regularly, and without worrying that it’s going to diminish my love of rock, hip-hop, or any other form of music I might like.

It’s the same when navigating differences at work.

An especially effective technique for appreciating is to look for the values that drive behaviors you don’t like. Chances are you share the same values; you just rank them differently.

In my colleague’s case, she valued a particular kind of relationship with me, where I saw her and her work in a more fully fleshed-out way. To-do lists weren’t enough for her; our relationship mattered more than efficiency.

Even though I tended to rank these values in reverse order during the busy work day, it’s not like I didn’t value our relationship at all. Quite the contrary: our relationship mattered a lot to me. This made it easy to appreciate how she put our relationship before efficiency.

Appreciation releases “good” chemicals in the brain, especially oxytocin and dopamine — calming the amygdala, and opening up access to the neocortex and other brain regions where we carry out collaboration, planning, and other functions that make us more effective colleagues.

Brain-training strategy #3: Separate style from substance

The norm in the workplace is to conflate style and substance. If we’re bothered by someone’s communication style, work style, or conflict style, we’re more likely to think of them as a “bad” colleague. If we’re their boss, we might try to correct their “bad behavior.”

Poor performance does exist. But because we’re wired to conflate style and substance, we often see different styles as poor performance.

That’s all the more reason to get intentional about recognizing styles for what they are: natural, normal differences that result from a combination of culture and individuality.

It helps if our organizations also set clear standards, expectations, and definitions of performance, based as much as possible on work product and as little as possible on style.

The brain is wired to make snap judgments. It’s part of the amygdala’s survival function. Separating style from substance can slow down the judging machine and train our brains to be less eager to lock into a single story about how “bad” our colleagues are.

Like any training program, we need to be consistent and persistent in rewiring our brains. The rewards are more than worth it. Those lions all around us may not turn completely into purring kittens, but at least they won’t be as scary — and that’s good for us, for our colleagues, and for our lives.

This concludes our three-part series about a keynote address I delivered back in 2019 on why diversity by itself won’t get us vary far, and why trust and empathy are hard to build in the workplace.

In case you missed them, here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

Interested in discussing leadership topics in your organization or at your next event? Check out my speaking page or drop me a note.