NLP Weekly: 12 Second Decisions, Agility, Revealed Opportunities
NLP Weekly: Making your leadership & performance second nature.
Performance: You make a decision every 12 seconds.
Okay, not exactly. I'm currently reading Endure by Alex Hutchison. It focuses primarily on human physical endurance - running, mountain climbing, adventure pursuits, explorers, etc.
In Endure, Hutchinson discusses how any activity that lasts longer than approximately 12 seconds demands a conscious decision to continue. Once an activity exceeds that 12-second threshold, energy reserves shift. The brain steps in more actively gauging factors such as fatigue, pain, breathing, and perceived effort.
Your decision-making to keep going becomes an ongoing process, with the brain assessing how much energy and effort are available and weighing this against the potential for exhaustion.
“Endurance” is not just physical. It is a mental capacity to persist. The longer the activity continues, the more your brain engages in this “decision-making” role, constantly evaluating and encouraging (or discouraging) the body based on perceived limits, motivation, and environmental cues.
It is about mental strategies and willpower. Training the mind to tolerate discomfort and manage these decisions can play a crucial role in pushing one's limits.
No wonder you're tired after a mentally taxing conversation or interaction with a colleague or customer. No wonder you felt you needed a coffee or other pick me up after spending 10 minutes figuring something out in Excel. Your brain was making decisions constantly on your behalf.
Training the mind to tolerate discomfort and manage the decision-making involved in endurance can be surprisingly accessible:
- Controlled Exposure to Discomfort
Gradually exposing yourself to small, manageable levels of discomfort helps the brain adapt to challenging situations. The goal is to feel discomfort without overwhelming yourself. - Mental Reframing and Self-Talk
Practicing positive self-talk and reframing discomfort as a growth opportunity can shift your perception of it. - Visualization of Success in Challenging Situations
Mental imagery primes your brain for real situations, so visualize both the physical feelings (like heavy breathing, fatigue) and the actions you’ll take to stay calm and motivated.
Leadership: Fostering agility.
Our lives move fast enough as it is. In our workplaces, someone is often applying pressure to do it faster, more productively, to meet complex demands and problems with ease and greater efficiency.
Some of these demands might look and feel like trying to turn a cruise ship around inside a phone booth. How is that supposed to happen???
Many companies and teams forget to acknowledge that you cannot have an agile, fast-moving, productive, and engaged team without a building a culture that nurtures individual agility and autonomy.
Leaders are responsible for creating environments where people feel courageous, confident, and safe in bringing the best of themselves forward each day, to each interaction. Regardless of your role inside an organization, you can shift the culture by empowering & inviting others to repeat impactful individual actions and behaviours consistently at scale.
Your people, your team, must feel comfortable and confident to live into their own individual values within the context of the organization's values. Brene Brown reminds us that an individual human can only have one set of values that we live by - often work places choose values then give them a definition that implies a desired behaviour but may not actually be the definition of the value.
Having the conviction to lead, means finding ways and making invitations for your team to connect their values, with the organization's values, with their own work. The results are:
- Redcued emotional labour
- Improved stress management
- Increased employee engagement
Nature: Hidden dangers & revealed opportunities
Every Friday morning I take my dog to a forested watershed for a couple of hours. With leaves having fallen off many of the trees, this morning I was able to see one of the largest wasp nests I have ever seen. I also saw the top 70 feet of a 120 foot tree resting on a 30 degree angle against another tree.
Our brains evolved to react more strongly to negative information. We often give more attention and energy to negative things. My route through the watershed would have taken me underneath both of these hidden dangers over the past several months. Multiple times, I was at risk but the reality is I had zero idea until today.
While I need to be aware of the tree and its potential to fall, the wasp nest at this time if year poses zero danger.
Simultaneously, with fallen leaves, new paths and routes through the watershed become not just visible but passable, enjoyable.
Nature reminds us to:
- Pause,
- Be aware of our surroundings,
- Consider our goals,
- Evaluate whether perceived challenges are real or not,
- Consider & create new options we may not have seen,
- Determine the best and most enjoyable route forward.
Where in your life might you be creating a bigger obstacle than what is actually there?
What options are available to you to proceed that you may not have given enough consideration to yet? How can you make the process more enjoyable?
How will you make sure you keep going after 12 seconds?
be awesome today,
-Graham
