Every day, our
brain is bombarded with millions of bits of input and data from the complex, chaotic
context we live in. Somehow, it needs to organize this massive flow of
information and make sense of it, and the Reticular Activating System (RAS) is
a key factor in this process.
The RAS is a bundle of nerves at our brainstem
that filters through the information input, picking out what is important, and
eliminating the rest.
The RAS has
received a lot of positive press from the self-help industry in recent years,
as it enables us to maintain a clear focus and align our perceptions, thoughts,
emotions and actions towards the achievement of our goals.
Your RAS identifies
what you focus on most and creates a perceptual filter for it – which usually consists
of a combination of beliefs, values, emotions and habitual thought patterns. It
then seeks information that validates your perceptual filters, sifting through
the noise, applying the search parameters your mind has developed over time, optimizing
the search results and creating an increasingly intricate map of reality.
Your RAS dictates what you are able to perceive
In many ways,
your RAS operates like an internet search engine, which learns about your personal
profile and preferences, optimizing the search results to fit your interests better
and better, every time you use your browser. This has the neat effect that the
search results become more streamlined, personalized and relevant, reinforcing your
perceptual filters every time you engage with the world.
But at the same
time, your RAS will increasingly eliminate anything that does not fit your
pre-set filters, reducing your ability to get a complete and reliable picture
of what is really going in your context. This effect is well documented in the
context of internet search engines, where clever algorithms effectively create
a sort of information-bubble or cocoon
around us over time, reinforcing what we already believe to know, whilst
preventing us from being exposed to controversial information that might
challenge our world-view, force us to think through and assess reality more
comprehensively, and motivate us to adjust our filters.
This is one of
the reasons why two individuals conducting the same online search, using their
personal browsers and preferred search engines, may get totally different
search results.
Your RAS can seriously mess up your sales and business
negotiations
By controlling
what you are able to see, hear and sense, your RAS directly influences your
beliefs, thoughts, emotions and actions. Although this provides us with many
significant benefits in everyday life, this effect can have a seriously
negative impact in the context of intercultural sales and business
negotiations.
When coaching
our corporate clients on how to improve their results in global business deals,
we often find that the negotiators:
- default
to the tried-and-tested, best-practice ways of doing things they learned in
their home-country
- fail
to properly observe the personal and cultural behavioral patterns and
preferences of the people they are negotiating with
- don’t
have the means or experience required to interpret these patterns correctly and
adapt their interactions accordingly
In many ways,
the RAS of these negotiators has created a massive
blind spot in their mind, making it practically impossible for them to
access the information available in plain sight before them, due to the
censoring effect of their perceptual filters.
You can train your RAS to provide better results
In a recent
negotiation seminar, one of the course participants told me that in her native
language, RAS was the word they used to describe wild, aggressive dogs. Indeed,
in many ways, our RAS often behaves like an intelligent, fierce, untamed
watchdog.
The more we get
involved in intercultural negotiations, the more we need to train our RAS, to
check, update or even reprogram the perceptual filters it applies, in order for
us to understand the situational dynamics more completely and craft better,
more sustainable deals.
As a first practical
step in this direction, I teach my clients to activate their inner observer, enabling
it to identify, understand and interpret differing patterns of behavior. In our
global business world, it is becoming essential for us to proactively manage our
RAS.
If we don’t, we may frequently encounter business disaster abroad.