Recently, during a podcast interview, I was asked a question I’d never been asked before or even considered to ask myself.  The question was, During my long career in mental health, what was my best day?  The day came to me in a flash, full blown, surprising me so much that I had to pause for a moment to adjust to the intense feeling that washed over me.

“This isn’t what the interviewer is looking for,” I thought to myself and I tried to quickly come up with something else, but this memory wouldn’t be pushed aside for something less. It was like it wanted to be remembered out loud. So I launched into it.

My best day in my career, I said, was on the fourth day of a group I was co-facilitating with my colleague Louise Franklin, 20 years before, with victims of the Bosnian War, in a room inside a bullet riddled building in Osijek, Croatia, on the border with Serbia, with genocidal Serbian forces just across the Drava River.

For most of the Croatian men and women, this group was the first time they had been given the space to really talk about the horrible things that had happened to them, working through the trauma with principles that could empower a new attitude for relating to what they had been through and were sure to face again in their war-torn country.  Each day, the group opened up a little more, psychologically and spiritually, and then on the fourth day the group reached a kind of heroic shift in consciousness where we found a place of peace inside that transcended what was happening outside. It was a place of power and dignity, where the outside did not prevail … did not have the last word … could no longer refute or diminish the peace we felt as a result of the One Self our sharing and caring had created. It was a miraculous moment of discovering that we had achieved and could even sustain a higher state of mind, which is love, as we lived through whatever egregiousness the world had done to us and would continue to do. The realization of this truth placed smiles on faces that hadn’t smiled in a long time.

That was my best day at work.

We tend to believe that the judgmental thoughts we silently think in our head are inconsequential, since no one hears them. We also might think the same about the positive regard and good will we quietly extend to others. The fact is, both are of great consequence.

Our facial expressions, body language, emotional subtleties, and even our hidden intentions all register inside the other person’s brain, giving us away. We read each other’s brains all the time and we have the mirror neuron system to blame or thank for it.

This system was discovered in 1996, when neuroscientists observed that the exact same brain region active in a monkey eating a peanut was also active in a monkey without a peanut who was simply watching the other eat. Since then, a mountain of research has been conducted on mirror neurons, which turns out to be highly developed in human beings. Dr. Marco Iacoboni of UCLA, a leading mirror neuron researcher, states: “Mirror neurons allow us to understand the mental states of other people and practically puts us in each other’s mind.”

Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, body language, voice, and even the subtle meanings of one another. There are forty-three muscles in our face that produce facial expressions for the seven basic human emotions we experience — fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, contempt, and happiness. Each of these emotions and their physical expression are the same for everyone around the world.

For example, with fear eyebrows pull up and together, upper eyelids pull up, and our mouth stretches. Each fear-based facial movement prepares us for a fight-or-flight stress reaction. With happiness, the muscle around the eyes tighten, “crow’s feet” appear around the eyes, our cheeks raise, and our lip corners raised diagonally. The signs are subtle but once learned, we instantly discern the mood a facial expression conveys.

Mirror neurons are what makes our emotional state contagious and why, biologically, hostility bumps up your blood pressure and kindness lowers it. It’s why friends are healing, and enemies are toxic. When we see someone suffering or overjoyed, our mirror neurons make us feel the suffering or the joy.

So, how does this relate to leadership. It is the way the brain’s mirror neuron system and your attitudinal stance work together to create meaningful, forward moving relationships. In generating positive interpersonal connection, research shows that there are three attitudes that comes into play.

• First is your willingness to drop roles and facades to be authentically yourself. This mirrors in the people you lead as the freedom to be themselves, which leads to greater self-expression and self-direction.
• Second is your unconditional positive regard for your employees, which mirrors in them as the self-worth and belonging that builds trust and self-confidence.
• Third is your empathy for your employees, which mirrors as the self-awareness and self-acceptance that fosters positive personality change.

Relate to employees in this way and there will be nothing coming from you that they need to defend against. These three attitudes work the same way with families and friends. With the right practice, you can cultivate this attitudinal stance and rewire your brain to embody it. I present an approach you can put to use in Chapter 12 of my book The End of Stress, Four Steps to Rewire Your Brain.

In 1979, Dr. Helen Langer of Harvard conducted the now famous experiment with men in their late seventies and early eighties who were languishing in a nursing home [1]. Langer observed that the men were being treated as physically and mentally inept by nursing home staff and even family members. But Langer theorized that the men’s decline might not actually be an inevitable consequence of old age but due to the men internalizing the low expectation of others. To test her theory, Langer took the men on a one-week retreat where they could revisit a time when they were strong, vital and intelligent. She accomplished this makeover by turning the environment at the retreat house into what it would have looked like two decades prior in 1959.

The men wore clothes that were fashionable in 1959, ate the food they ate then, carried photo IDs of how they looked in that year, and were encouraged to behave as they had twenty years before. The men were also given newspapers and magazines from 1959 to read, shown films and television programs popular that year, and even the parking lot was staged with automobiles from the 1950’s. Langer thought that all this staging would generate a kind of placebo effect, tricking the men into believing they were younger, which, biologically, would establish the mind-body connection that would make them younger.

The results were astonishing. Compared to the control group of of other elders who went on an ordinary retreat, the “time traveling” men showed improvements in joint flexibility and manual dexterity. Their arthritis began to retreat, blood pressure dropped, and their IQ’s improved. Some of the men who previously couldn’t bend over to tie their shoe were tossing a football around as they waited for the bus that would take them back to the low expectation world in the nursing home.

Langer’s experiment was one the first studies to prove that mind over matter is real. Science now knows that our expectations mobilize vast inner resources and directs those resources toward fulfilling a desired outcome. Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School and Maryanne Garry of Victoria University teamed up to survey all the studies on the power of expectation[2] and the body of evidence they found shows that once we anticipate that a desired outcome could happen, good or bad, we set in motion a chain of thoughts, attitudes, and actions that work together to actually make it happen. It is now being called the Expectancy Effect.

“The effects of suggestion,” Dr. Garry states, “are wider and often more surprising than many people might otherwise think. If we can harness the power of suggestion,” Garry concludes, “we can improve people’s lives.” [3]

Just imagine the level of success an organization could achieve if it harnessed this power. Think of your own life in terms of tapping your children’s potential, improving your health, or building your financial security. Happily, mobilizing the Expectancy Effect to one’s advantage is simpler than you might think. I describe how to do it in Chapter 13 of my book The End of Stress.

References

1.      Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility(New York: Random House, 2009), 5–12.

2.      R. B. Michael, M. Garry, and I. Kirsch, “Suggestion, Cognition, and Behavior, “Current Directions in Psychological Science 21, no. 3 (2012): 151–56.

3.      The Power of Suggestion: What We Expect Influences Our Behavior, for Better or Worse,” News, Association for Psychological Science, June 6, 2012

Number 33: Receiving

My family and friends threw me a birthday party and during the planning I became aware that I was shutting down emotionally, wishing I could call the party off. When I meditated on what was turning my heart cold, I discovered it was a very old shame reaction I thought I’d healed … a feeling of unworthiness and undeserving of being celebrated. Obviously, my sense of shame needed more work.  So, at the party, I committed myself to being vulnerable whenever I started to shut down emotionally, moving through it toward opening my heart to receive whatever form of love someone was extending at the time. It was uncomfortable but gradually those moments of receiving became the best birthday presents I’ve ever received.