On Fear, Feedback and Focus – the brain’s involvement in Patient Opinion!!

One of my favourite quotes is “you can’t out think your brain”! This amazing piece of human equipment is designed to “keep its human safe” and it will do whatever is required to achieve that. Although we now know it responds mightily to the human mind and directed thinking, its physiology is such, that it has usually beaten our thoughts to action before we are even aware we’ve had them!

The benefit of this is that we are spontaneously responsive to everyday stimuli and able to function as “normal” human beings.  The downside is that sometimes the hardwiring distracts us from what we actually, consciously hope to achieve. The best news of all is that with attention and focus we now know neuroplasticity (rewiring) kicks in and we can change habits, thoughts and behaviours by choice. (This is not necessarily easy, spontaneous or quick, I might add….but it can and does happen!)

So what might happen when we think about subscribing to Patient or Care Opinion? The first thing the brain will think is “don’t like change – it’s an unknown and it’s risky”.  It’ll activate its hippocampus (stored memory and learning),  basal ganglia (habits, sensations, prior experiences) and amygdala (emotions, fight or flight) and remind us that feedback is often NOT a pleasant experience and risks putting us out of favour with those in authority or “our in group” generally. This is NOT good for survival, so best avoided as far as it is concerned! No wonder we get a visceral response! No matter how sophisticated, educated or powerful we are…..this is fear and it’s there for a purpose.

This is where attention and focus come in.  They ARE under our control. Once our attention is drawn to our fear (and it is acknowledged, even validated) we can direct our attention and focus away from pure survival to the more sophisticated goals we have in mind.  This pulls me out of my limbic system and its links to all things autonomic/ automatic (feeling of dread, increased heart rate, blood pressure etc) and into my prefrontal cortex, also known as the Executive Centre! This is the part of the brain associated with logic, decision making, goal setting and the like, usually a much more comfortable experience for an executive!

So this is where focus comes in; another favourite quote of mine is “the mind/ brain of the leader wires the minds/ brains of the whole organisation” (Geoffrey Schwarz; neuroscientist at a Leadership and the Brain workshop; Brisbane 2012). There are all sorts of complicated scientific reasons why it works but basically “neurones that fire together wire together”, so the more we purposefully direct neurones to fire together (focus) the more likely we are to rewire and build a new habitual way of thinking or behaving. This means that if we as leaders choose to acknowledge then work with the fear of feedback; choose to take feedback courageously anyway; choose to act on feedback and choose to celebrate the success of change and connection with our community of healthcare recipients (which releases dopamine and feels good!) THEN we can change the perception of and response to feedback in our organisation. We’ve seen it happen, we know it can….maybe there’s a little more science to it than we realised….a fantastic example of an evidence base and human approach blending powerfully together.