What do you notice?

Have a look at the picture and answer this question – ‘What do you notice?’.

We have posed this task to thousands of people over the years and the first thing nearly everyone says is that one answer is wrong. 40-16 is not 14. They are right.

So why are us humans so often drawn to the negative? Three sums were right after all!

Simply, it is because we are conditioned as human beings to spot the negative or what might go wrong. In part, this comes from the survival instinct honed by cave men and women back in the day.

However, this conditioning can significantly hamper the success of behavioural change programmes. When faced with trying out a new sales technique with real customers or a new leadership technique with real colleagues, our brain quickly spots the risks and dangers and wastes no time letting us know. Beliefs like ‘I will get it wrong?’ or ‘It will negatively impact my relationship?’ quickly come up and before we know it, we are telling ourselves to stick with what we were doing before.

However these are only beliefs. They are not facts. And there are many alternative beliefs that we could adopt that could make it much more likely we will give it a go – for example, ‘It will make a big difference’, ‘My team will value this’, ‘I can do this, it’s not that hard’, ‘I have done similar things before and they went fine’ etc.

So yes, we might want to practice first to build some confidence with new techniques however, let’s not let our old conditioning hold us back from new possibilities.