By way of a warning this post is not about insurance (strictly speaking) so don’t be to disappointed. On a Thursday morning I attend a great meeting of local businesses. It gives us a chance to promote business within the local community and to provide access for our clients to a wide variety of trades and professions who we know and trust and are happy to recommend. Within this group there is a wonderful chap named Mike Duckett who runs a company called ‘Coaching for Success’. How best to describe Mike’s work?…. I would say that he facilitates your success (in whichever field it is required – business, sport, media, cuisine etc) by helping you realise and address weaknesses, strengths, hurdles and hangups. He opens doors that probably existed but you didnt have the key, or perhaps couldn’t find it. Anyway…. his services are useful to many of us and in particular what he spoke about this morning struck a chord with me.

What does all this have to do with Chimps etcetera? Well you may have heard Olympic certainty (I mean hopeful) Chris Hoy talk about his inner chimp. Mike gave us an illustration which has been used by the team GB cycling psychiatrist and it would appear to good effect.

We all have in us or with us…. stick with me on this one…. A chimp, a human and a computer.

The chimp and the human deal with the here and now and the computer is where we store all the past and the lessons learnt. The chimp is (being fairly primitive) in charge of base emotions, often reacting instantly and instinctively with gut reaction and emotional strength. The human is the more logical and rational part of us who is in charge of making reasonable decisions and properly thinking through things and making rational decisions.

So whats the problem? The problem is that the chimp always wakes up first. When faced with a new situation we often react emotionally and then store that reaction as a default in the computer… this is called a ‘gremlin’ (which we don’t want). What we want to try and do is get our human to form a rational reaction and decision and store that in our computer as an ‘autopilot’ so that when faced with the same or similar situation we know what we are doing and don’t get all, well ‘chimpy’ about it.

So how do we make sure we are storing autopilots in our computer and not gremlins? Through the cunning use of bananas! That’s right people. I am not imploring you to run out and panic buy bananas, these are all metaphorical bananas. There are two types. There is the distraction banana which in real terms is using a different task where the chimp might be useful (competitive sport like cycling for example – remember the chimp is stronger than you) and the other is the reward banana which is where you might consciously reward yourself for not following the chimp’s previous advice or gremlin. Either way the aim is to get the chimp into a  box where he is happy with his banana and so you can get on with focused and rational thinking.

But don’t take my word for it all…… I’m not the professional. So if you think you might need to sort out your chimps from your humans and throw around some bananas then you need to speak to Mike at Coaching for Success. If it works for Olympic athletes then I’m sure it could help you (other non-chimp related techniques are available).

Have a great Easter.

Alistair

Visit Mike’s website for more information  –  www.coachingforsuccess.co.uk