|
|
|||||||||||
Product Categories
|
First Brain
The content of this article is made of adapted excerpts from one of the few books that have rocked me off my chair, You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard—Reach the First Brain to Communicate in Business and in Life. Copyright © 1992 Bert Decker. All rights reserved. Please, buy yourself a copy; it’s one of the best, most significant books you’ll ever buy! “COMMUNICATION IS SELLING … Communication IS selling … and once we see communication as a form of selling, it suddenly hits home that we had better get serious about communicating effectively if we want to be successful, to have some influence—or simply to have others hear and understand us. So, since communication is selling, then what we want is for our listeners to “buy in,” to agree. We want our listeners to make a decision in our favor. And what will our listeners base that decision on? Primarily, on how they feel about us, on information received at an emotional level, on whether we’ve made emotional contact. If the first thing to understand about communication is that we are ALL selling something, then the second and even more crucial thing to understand is that people buy on emotion and justify with facts. You may resist this statement. You may want to shout, ‘No! No! No! I am a rational, cognitive human being! I make calm, considered, well-thought-out decisions! I do not buy on emotion!’ But you do. Everybody does. Contrary to our academic training, people DO buy on emotion and justify with fact. And the sooner we’ve accepted this basic fact of communication, the sooner we can use it to become more effective and persuasive in our own communication. If you think about it, and if you’re honest with yourself, you have to admit that most of your decisions are often made on the basis of ‘This is what I WANT to do.’ Then you think up all the reasons why what you WANT to do is really the logical thing to do. We ALL buy on emotion and justify with fact. The fact that we buy on emotion is a natural fact, neither good nor bad. An emotional decision isn’t necessarily the wrong decision. There’s no shame in admitting we’re emotional creatures, and that emotion has a powerful influence on everything we do, think, and choose. In fact, it’s foolish not to admit it. Communicating is a contact sport. The truth is, if you want to reach, persuade or motivate people, you have to make emotional contact with them. You have to reach the hearts as well as the minds of your listeners. More specifically, you have to reach the ‘heart of the mind’—what I call the First Brain—the emotional part of the mind. ‘First Brain’ is the secret of believability, essential to effective, persuasive communication. The First Brain is the secret to attaining mastery of the direction of our personal and professional life. The First Brain is our emotional brain. It is real. It is physical. And it is powerful. Neglect it, ignore it, fail to realize and harness its power, and most likely you will fail to communicate effectively. Understand it, and you will connect in your communications. You will have emotional contact with your listeners. YOU’VE GOT TO BELIEVED TO BE HEARD In the spoken medium, what you say must be believed in order to have impact. No message, regardless of how eloquently stated, brilliantly defended, and painstakingly documented it may be, is able to penetrate a wall of distrust, apprehension, or indifference. If you want your listener to be persuaded and motivated, he or she must believe your message. And for your message to be believed, you must be believable. And believability is an emotional quality. It’s built on an emotional level. MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE GATEKEEPER Effective communication is a lot more than simply transferring information from me to you, or vice versa. There is a gate between us through which communication must pass. The gate is tended by a Gatekeeper, standing guard before the House of the Intellect. The Gatekeeper’s name is First Brain. Will the Gatekeeper open or close the gate of communication? Will our message get through, or will it be blocked? Whenever we communicate, our listener’s Gatekeeper is right there on guard, figuratively asking, ‘Friend or foe?’ The Gatekeeper has complete power to grant or deny access to our listener’s higher analytical and decision-making processes. A master communicator is a person who knows how to befriend the gatekeeper, who knows how to become ‘First Brain Friendly,’ so that his or her message can get through effectively and persuasively. THE FIRST BRAIN REVEALED You may be surprised to learn that your brain is not really one brain but several. You’ve probably heard about the differences between ‘left brain’ thinking and ‘right brain’ thinking, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Left brain and right brain are actually just two halves of the highly developed cerebral cortex—what I call the New Brain. But there’s a more important ‘brain’ to be aware of, and knowing how this ‘brain’ works can profoundly affect the way you communicate with others. This ‘brain’ is a much more forceful and fundamental part of you than either the left or right brain. I call it the First Brain. The First Brain is the nonreasoning, nonrational part of our brain. Simply put, it is the seat of human emotion, composed of the brainstem and the limbic system. It’s the most primitive part of the brain, consisting of components that existed between 200 million and 500 million years ago. The New Brain is the cerebral cortex—that large, intricately folded, hemispherical mass that surrounds the more basic First Brain. The New Brain is the seat of conscious thought, memory, language, creativity, and decision-making. I call it the New Brain because it is so recent compared to the First Brain, a mere three to four million years old. When people communicate by the spoken word, they almost invariably aim their message at the New Brain and completely overlook the First Brain. This is not to say that the New Brain is unimportant. On the contrary, our goal is to get our message across to the New Brain because that’s the decision-making part of the mind. But to reach the New Brain, our message must first pass through the First Brain, the emotional part of the brain. If we leave the First Brain out of the equation, our message will be distorted or diminished—or it may not get through at all. The reason the First Brain is so important to effective communication is precisely because it is the seat of emotion, and emotional response. It is clear that the most important language in effective communication is almost an unspoken language, the language of trust. Emotional contact, emotional impact, believability, and trust all take place in the preconscious realm of the First Brain. Though the goal of effective communication is to get our message across to the cerebral, rational process of the New Brain, we can’t do this without getting through the First Brain first. It’s the listener’s First Brain which makes the decision whether or not to trust and believe the ‘speaker.’ It’s the First Brain which decides whether a person represents comfort and nurture—or anxiety and menace. The key to understanding the First Brain is realizing its essential purpose is survival. The two basic parts of the First Brain are sometimes called the reptilian or mammalian brains, for that is almost all that those creatures have. And for them, the purpose of the first brain is primary and essential—they must immediately ‘feel’ and react to danger. For that is what the First Brain basically does—quickly analyzes all incoming data in light of the question, ‘Is this situation safe?’ IS IT SAFE? Now we human beings have a highly specialized, complex, sophisticated and astounding New Brain that thinks. But, surprisingly enough, the role of the First Brain remains essentially the same. Even in an ordinary, civilized, social conversation between two human beings in the 21st century, our First Brains are still only interested in one question: ‘Is it safe?’ If you want to get your message across, you must reach and connect with the First Brain. You must persuade your listener’s First Brain that you are trustworthy, that you represent warmth, comfort, and safety. As a result of important and exciting new discoveries in brain research in recent years, we now know that all the hundreds of sights and sounds we give off as communicators—all the visual and auditory cues we project—must first pass through the figurative switching station of the listener’s First Brain. This emotion powered switching station inside our listener’s head determines if we are believable, likable, and worth listening to. Everything we say, all the stimuli we communicate, is filtered and modified by the listener’s First Brain before it is sent on to his or her New Brain—the cerebral cortex—to be analyzed and acted upon. If we are energetic, enthusiastic, and believable, our words will actually be given more impact and energy by the listener’s First Brain before they are switched to the New Brain. But if we appear boring, anxious, or insincere, our words may not even reach their destination. Instead, our message will be discolored or even tuned out at the switching station by our lack of believability. If we lack believability, we risk failure in ALL the areas of our lives that really matter to us. BELIEVABILITY In our communication with others, trust and believability are virtually synonymous. Interchangeable. You can’t have one without the other. To communicate persuasively and effectively, you must win the trust of your listeners. And to win their trust, you must be believable. It is key for you to understand that belief is a First Brain function. Belief is acceptance on faith. Some people will believe you on first impression. Most need at least a little convincing. They need to see you, hear you, and interact with you before they can invest belief in you. Either way, belief is emotionally based. It bypasses the intellect. It comes from the nuances of behavior, NOT from facts and logic. It is perceived and felt rather than analyzed. The First Brain does not understand words. It speaks an altogether different language: the language of behavior. Whereas our New Brain spends most of its time sifting words, symbols, concepts, and data, the First Brain hunts for meaning in thousands of nuances of human behavior that the New Brain never even registers. Does the voice quaver—or does it project authority? Do the hands gesture nervously—or forcefully? Do the eyes flicker hesitantly—or gaze unflinchingly? Is the posture diffident—or confident? This is the language of the First Brain. It is the language of Trust!” Didn’t we tell you this was going to rock you? Only one question remains: How do we make friends with the Gatekeeper—the First Brain—so that our message can get through the gate? Wouldn’t you like to know that? Well, we’ll let Mr. Decker lift a corner of the veil enshrouding the answer, but to know ALL the details, you’ll have to get a copy of his book. Sorry. “How do we become First Brain friendly? By being natural. By learning to use energy, enthusiasm, motion, expression—all the multichannel, nonverbal cues that enable us to make emotional contact with the listener. By becoming freer—less inhibited—more naturally ourselves.” We really urge you to buy a copy of Bert Decker’s book! Daniel G. St-Jean, with Laurel Simmons |
|
|
||||||||
 |
