“Normally, when you see that something is right, the brain moves forward to execute it.”

A thought by Henry Cloud, from his book, Necessary Endings (p. 58).

HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

And that is a very good thing.

Henry says, “Your brain exercises something psychologists call conflict-free aggression. (Not bad aggression, as we normally cast it, like violence), conflict-free aggression is energy that is free to take action, not hampered, so you can function. If you have ever been depressed or anxious while you tried to concentrate or reach a goal, you know what it is like when this ability is missing or unavailable to you.

“If aggression, initiative, or energy is without conflict, it is free to move you to perform functions like these:

•      To sense what is really going on around you;

•      To think logically;

•      To think abstractly;

•      To exercise good judgment;

•      To concentrate;

•      To see dangers realistically;

•      To see reality;

•      To make decisions;

•      Then, to act on all of the above.

“If there is an internal conflict, however, or what neuroscientists are now calling perceived errors, then the action shuts down and you move away from the decision or protest it. You don’t see it clearly and can’t act when you do. Where does this conflict come from? Your internal software, which is composed of your belief systems about endings and your past experiences with them.”

He then says, “A… leader I worked with told me that when he interacted with a particular direct report, he often found himself unable to think or to concentrate. As we probed further, he recognized that these feelings came up whenever they got into a discussion about trimming staff from that person’s department. It was a department that this leader formerly headed; he still had a lot of relationships with the people there and felt deep loyalty to them. The very thought of an ending that would affect the people he cared about made his brain slow down. His conflict with an ending affected the kinds of functions I listed above, and he was freezing up. The sad thing was that he was actually working against himself, for if he had all of his brainpower available to him at those moments, he might have been able to find ways to save many of them—but not without his creativity and insight, which was shutting down. When we removed that way of thinking from his mental map, he was able to get moving again.”

And that is what we want, isn’t it? 

Yes, yes